St Augustine and the crisis of the present world
By Roberto de Mattei | 29 October 2025
The precarious truce in Gaza need not foster illusions either about the future of this agreement or about the possibility of an imminent peace between Russia and Ukraine. Between the two ongoing conflicts there exists, moreover, a substantial difference. The Gaza agreement was possible in the first place because there was a winner and a loser, respectively Israel and Hamas. Secondly because a broad cooperation of Arab-Muslim states was formed, determined to restore the order that Hamas disrupted with its attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. In Ukraine, by contrast, not only is there still no winner and loser, but there is no broad coalition of states willing to isolate Russia, which, unlike Hamas, is a vast country with nuclear capability. China, on which Russia now depends, has every interest in freezing US engagement in Europe, in order to divert its forces from the Indo-Pacific and deal the death blow against Taiwan that it has been preparing for years. To increase his military presence in that geopolitical region, American president Trump would like to withdraw from the European front, not understanding how the game at stake in Ukraine touches all of the West. Indeed, within what we call the West, if on the economic, political and military levels Europe is the younger sister of the United States, on the spiritual and cultural levels it is its mother, because American civilisation sinks its roots in the intellectual, religious and moral heritage of Europe. Ukraine, the ancient kingdom of Kyiv, for its history and the political will it expresses today, is part of Europe and not of Muscovite Russia. Abandoning it would be an act of moral cowardice and political short-sightedness.
Trump, moreover, in his effort to end the Ukrainian match, risks making the same mistake as Putin: underestimating not so much the character of Zelensky, an actor who has made his life his stage, but rather the spirit of resistance of the Ukrainian people: a nation that endured, without giving in, the Holodomor, the extermination by famine (1932–1933) intended by Stalin, with the deaths of approximately four million people, and which, between 1941 and 1960, expressed the most combative anti-Soviet military resistance in Eastern Europe. It will be difficult to reach an agreement that would impose unacceptable conditions on this people.
In short, we are faced with almost inextricable knots. President Trump certainly does not know the pages dedicated to Russia by Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853), and perhaps not even those of the American historian Henry Adams (1838–1918), who identified the danger of this eastern country, defining it as an immense territorial and human reality, difficult to understand or govern, a natural force rather than a nation in the Western sense.1
It is not clear to what extent Trump’s primary goal is to enhance America’s greatness or that of his own “ego” by winning a Nobel Peace Price, now discredited, but to which he seems to attach great importance. However, it must be acknowledged that the American president is surrounded by a team of aides ready to correct his miscalculations, while the Russian president, like all dictators, is dramatically isolated in his decisions, because no one dares to contradict him. Trump is looking to the laurels he can achieve beyond his presidential term; Putin knows he is condemned to rule until death if he wants to avoid death at the end of his rule. For this reason too, a suicidal impulse seems to be consuming the president of the Russian Federation. Putin has had his adversaries assassinated, both inside and outside his country, and is massacring hundreds of thousands of his compatriots in one of the most disastrous military campaigns ever undertaken by Russia in its history. Russia’s summer offensive is drawing to a close, and, as Marta Serafini points out in the 20 October edition of Corriere della Sera, the Russian tsar has not achieved even one of the results announced. Potrkrovsk, in danger for over a year, has not fallen, nor has the Russian army ever gained control of the Dnetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson Oblast, as Putin claims. The Russian dictator knows he cannot win, yet he is willing to do anything to avoid losing. It is difficult to predict his future moves, like those of Trump, who loves improvisation and theatrical gestures.
The problem is that international relations were once complex chess matches between expert players, who engaged all their intellectual faculties in the match. Today, by contrast, what dominates the scene is a tangle of passions, which constitutes the primary cause of international instability. Robert Kaplan speaks of a “Shakespearean decline” to refer to the inner demons that push political leaders towards a certain degree of madness.2 However, contemporary men of power lack the tragic awareness and greatness of spirit that characterise Shakespeare’s characters in their descent into ruin.
Elizabethan theatre, moreover, has been replaced by a digital world in which each individual — leader, influencer or simple spectator — plays his role before an invisible audience, while social media encourage and multiply the expansive power of disordered passions. As in Shakespeare’s plays, emotions dominate reason, but the inner demons of Macbeth and Othello manifest themselves in the form of social dependence on algorithms. Anger, revenge, hatred and resentment have become the dominant impulses of a volatile collective psychology, fuelled in the virtual world, before a global audience.
It is in this context that there takes shape the inner collapse of a civilisation which, like Shakespeare’s characters, is consumed by its own demons. But today the madness is no longer confined to the silence of a palace, but is self-presented before a screen, like a live global tragedy. The psychology of individuals and the masses eludes one who attempts to reconstruct history according to preconceived ideological lines, because the contemporary era is no longer governed by ideas, but by collective moods and uncontrolled pathos. In the world of the passions, real and virtual, all ideologies dissolve. But the destructive force of communism survives, which Chinese president Xi Jinping relaunches in Beijing and Vladimir Putin translates into practices of power in Moscow. The prophecy of Fatima comes true, and the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church, with its infallible truths of faith and morals, remains the last fixed point in the contemporary chaos. When all is swallowed up in the vortex of the present, and time becomes a directionless current of events in which everything is possible and everything is unpredictable, historical and theological reflection is necessary. God’s intervention is possible at any moment, and a single act of faithfulness or betrayal by one man is enough to change the course of events.In the 5th century the Roman general Boniface, Comes Africae — Governor of Roman Africa — (circa 422-432 AD), betrayed his faith and the Empire by conspiring with the invading Vandals (Prosper of Aquitaine, Chronicon, ad annum 429). Saint Augustine, who urged him to fight, died while the city of Hippo was under siege, meditating on the meaning of the fall of the Roman Empire, which was collapsing not only because of the strength of the barbarians, but also because of the defection of its defenders. Yet on the ruins of that Empire the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages would be born. The theology of history of St Augustine, witness to the decline of the Roman Empire, is the only one that can open the heart to hope. Who today, if not Leo XIV, could recover its perennial significance.
Notes