Augustine and the Limits of Politics

Jean Bethke Elshtain

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268161149
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie médiévale et de la Renaissance

Now with a new foreword by Patrick J. Deneen.

Jean Bethke Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and presents an Augustine who created a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty, love, and care, as well as a chastened form of civic virtue. The result is a controversial book about one of the world's greatest and most complex thinkers whose thought continues to haunt all of Western political philosophy. What is our business "within this common mortal life?" Augustine asks and bids us to ask ourselves. What can Augustine possibly have to say about the conditions that characterize our contemporary society and appear to put democracy in crisis? Who is Augustine for us now and what do his words have to do with political theory? These are the underlying questions that animate Jean Bethke Elshtain's fascinating engagement with the thought and work of Augustine, the ancient thinker who gave no political theory per se and refused to offer up a positive utopia. In exploring the questions, Why Augustine, why now? Elshtain argues that Augustine's great works display a canny and scrupulous attunement to the here and now and the very real limits therein. She discusses other aspects of Augustine's thought as well, including his insistence that no human city can be modeled on the heavenly city, and further elaborates on Hannah Arendt's deep indebtedness to Augustine's understanding of evil. Elshtain also presents Augustine's arguments against the pridefulness of philosophy, thereby linking him to later currents in modern thought, including Wittgenstein and Freud.

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Why Augustine? Why Now?

In his classic book The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga writes of the lurchings, portents, signs, dislocations, and spreading dis-ease that marked the closure of one era and the uneven and often violent birth of another.¹ Hannah Arendt, in the preface to her collection of essays Between Past and Future, describes our condition as that of living in a “gap” between past and future.² We are zwischen den Zeiten, she claims, between the times. Arendt was writing nearly thirty years ago, but, if anything, we sense with growing urgency that we are nearing the end of an era. Perhaps this can simply be attributed to the coming of a new millennium. We know from previous epochs that stepping over the boundary that separates one century from another sends a collective frisson through humankind, whether those who face the next hundred years with grandiose hopes or those who approach it with foreboding reservations. Many there are who are buoyant about our prospects. They write enthusiastically about a “third wave” of civilization that will overtake us, a time in the near future in which we will all greet one another happily in cyberspace and the world will be as one via electronic egalitarianism and populist technocracy. There are those who continue to toot the horns and ring the bells marking—rightly—the collapse of the Soviet Empire. But there are problems. There always are. Although 1989 by no means ushered in an era of peace and justice, the slogan “the enlargement of markets and democracy” is what now passes as a foreign policy for the United States. And yet. . . my sense is that, in the dark of the night, as dusk settles over the land and we stare at our television sets or take time to read the newspaper, we are plunged into a deepening gloom. Things were supposed to be better, different somehow, than this.

For what do we see when we look around? We see families imploding and crime exploding. Moral panics flourish. Liberal democracy is in trouble in America, the wise and the worried tell us, and many of us believe this to be true. Experts and ordinary citizens lament the growth of mistrust, cynicism, and scandal. Although a dwindling band of pundits and apologists insist that we are simply going through birth pangs en route to a more glorious and productive future, such reassurances ring increasingly hollow. By any standard of objective evidence, those who point to the growth of corrosive forms of isolation, boredom, and despair; to declining levels of involvement in politics; to the overall weakening of that world known as democratic civil society, have the better case. It is true that we brighten to tales of community, especially if the talk is soothing and doesn’t demand very much from us. But when discussion turns to institutions and the need to sustain authoritative institutions of all kinds—and here I include families and churches and schools as well as governing bodies—attention withers and a certain sourness sets in. This bodes ill, for any ongoing way of life requires robust yet resilient institutions that embody and reflect, mediate and shape, our passions and our interests. As these overlapping associations of social life disappear or are stripped of legitimacy, a political and ethical wilderness spreads. People roam the prairie fixing on objects or policies or persons to excoriate or to celebrate, at least for a time, until some other enthusiasm or scandal sweeps over them. If we have lost the sturdiness and patience to sustain our society over the long haul, then our democracy, as a social world and a culture, is in trouble.

What can Augustine possibly have to say about any of this? Born in 354 in a provincial town in what is now Algeria; dying as Bishop of Hippo in North Africa in 430, what remains of Augustine are his vast works. After Augustine’s death a full list of those works was compiled, and Possidius, who did the compiling, believed no single human being could ever hope to read them all, according to Peter Brown, Augustine’s biographer. Brown also claims that Isidore of Seville “once wrote that if anyone told you he had read all the works of Augustine, he was a liar. From the time of his conversion to Catholic Christianity in 386 until his death in 430, Augustine wrote some 117 books.”³ That in and of itself would not recommend Augustine to us. But listen, if you will, to these words:

The depraved and distorted hopes of men esteem human fortunes happy when the splendor of buildings is in evidence, and the collapse of souls is not noticed; when magnificent theatres are erected, and the foundations of virtue are undermined; when the madness of extravagance is glorified, and the works of mercy are scoffed at. . . .⁴

Or these:

Who can adequately describe, or even imagine, the work of the Almighty? There is, first, this capacity for the good life, the ability to attain eternal felicity, by those arts which are called virtues, which are given solely by the grace of God in Christ to the children of the promise and of the kingdom. . . . Think of the wonderful inventions of clothing and building, the astounding achievements of human industry! Think of man’s progress in agriculture and navigation; of the variety, in conception and accomplishment, man has shown in pottery, in sculpture, in painting; the marvels in theatrical spectacles, in which man’s contrivances in design and production have excited wonder in the spectators and incredulity in the minds of those who heard of them. . . . Finally, the brilliant wit shown by philosophers and heretics in defending their very errors and falsehoods is something which beggars imagination!⁵

Or:

What tigress does not gently purr over her cubs, and subdue her fierceness to caress them? What kite, however solitary as he hovers over his prey, does not find a mate, build a nest, help to hatch the eggs, rear the young birds, and, as we may say, preserve with the mother of his family a domestic society as peaceful as he can make it? How much more strongly is a human being drawn by the laws of his nature, so to speak, to enter upon a fellowship with all his fellowmen and to keep peace with them, as far as lies in him.⁶

Our poignant and powerful sociality brings us grief, yes, but also the most joyous of blessings. Augustine’s childhood friend dies and his “heart grew sombre with grief.”

My own country became a torment and my own home a grotesque abode of misery. All that we had done together was now a grim ordeal without him. My eyes searched everywhere for him, but he was not there to be seen. I hated all the places we had known together, because he was not in them and they could no longer whisper to me “Here he comes!” as they would have done had he been alive but absent for a while. . . . Tears alone were sweet to me, for in my heart’s desire they had taken the place of my friend.⁷

Who, then, is this complex man, this marvel of nature, as some have called him? Who is Augustine for us now? And what have the few words I have just noted—words of prophetic warning; marvel at the wondrous accomplishments of human beings, even in the service of error; appreciation of the tender-heartedness and familial concern of tigresses and vigilant male birds; sorrow at the loss of a friend—to do with political inquiry? That is, after all, the prompting and imperative that animates my engagement with Augustine and the limits of politics.

The Self at Stake

Perhaps a little dance of Augustine sic et non will bring him into clearer focus for us in order that we might grapple with him more robustly. In his wonderful biography, Peter Brown claims that Augustine has “come as near to us . . . as the vast gulf that separates a modern man from the culture and religion of the later empire can allow.”⁸ Brown has in mind, specifically, The Confessions. Let us focus, therefore, on Augustine and the self, in part because we late-twentieth-century humans are so preoccupied with ourselves. It would seem that if Augustine commends himself to us, it will be through the prism of the self, because he was certainly no liberal democrat; he didn’t talk about a social contract; rights are not part of his political vocabulary; his understanding of authority is pretty much opaque to us, believing, as we do, that even persuasion is a form of imposition. But confession, so long as it is the individual talking about herself, that we sanction. Indeed, we now like to talk endlessly about the self. Is Augustine a kind of confessional forefather, then? This, I fear, would be a case of mistaken identity. For the self that is confessing in Augustine’s great work bears almost no resemblance to those selves that shamelessly parade their secrets on American television any day of the week. One is struck by the harshness, the meanness, and the utter predictability of many of these displays, as well as the aggressive ways in which confession and scandal have become weapons of war and instruments of pitiless assault against family and friends and that obscure enemy, Society, the world at large. One is saddened by the thinness of the selves put on display. There is little density and texture, all the marvels that are the subject of Book X of The Confessions, an evocation of memory unsurpassed in Western literature save, perhaps, in the works of Proust.

Augustine confesses what he knows and what he does not know. He does know the world isn’t boundlessly subjectivist; it does not revolve around what my mother calls “me, myself, and I.”

My love of you, o Lord, is not some vague feeling; it is positive and certain. . . . But what do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.⁹

This love frames other loves. It draws Augustine out of himself and the vortex of immediacy. It affords him the grandeur of a potent yet restrained lyricism that never grows sentimental, because it is borne out and up, so to speak, and it never loses its object, never becomes formless. When one loves only ones self, the self grows thin and flattens out; it reduces to a defensive point of order or oozes indiscriminately into a general sociological morass. If every external point of reference is lost, we lose our very selves. But we do not want to hear this. For the most part, I doubt that we believe it.

We don’t believe it because we have turned the loss of a confessing self who is drawn out of the self in order to be for others into an all-consuming self, an expressivist exhibition. Such self-consumed selves when they appear in public are then melded together, so to speak, forming a dense wall of immanence where every reference point is anthropocentric. This is analogous to the isolation people experience in totalitarian regimes, according to Hannah Arendt, where privation is followed by, indeed is the precondition for, the forging of an iron band of coercion. All plurality—all the space between people—is forfeit. Of course, we confront nothing so dire. But how much room is left, I wonder—how much space between people—so that selves might recognize one another in their distinctiveness, yet come together in friendship or solidarity, perhaps because they jointly “sigh” or “yearn” for that which is foreshadowed in the civitas terrena? There is no room for sighing or wonder or shame or reticence or praise in our crass spectacles of publicity. We need others, our popular culture suggests, as an addict needs a drink or a weapon needs a target.

And yet it is Augustine who now falls under a cloud of clinical suspicion. One reads his Confessions. He spends a lot of time talking about loving God and finding, or collecting, a self; about the evils of the flesh (“hissing cauldron of lust” in one memorable phrase) and what counts as an excess of curiositas. He takes to task his contemporaries for their gullibility and the folly of their faith in astrologers and soothsayers. That no doubt makes some among our contemporaries cross. Walk into any bookstore in America today and if you want to be gulled and offered code books to read the signs and predict your fate, or embrace half-baked theories promoted by people with remedies in their rucksacks and potions in their pockets, you will have no difficulty consuming remedies and taking cures and nostrums to your heart’s delight. What does Augustine offer by contrast? No cure for one’s ills. Rather, a dauntingly complex philosophic discourse about our ills, about the nature of memory itself, and about the distinction between literal, allegorical, and figurative meaning as we read and interpret texts, including Scripture. What has this to do with coming clean about personal addiction or love affairs with reckless men or hating your mother or wanting to kill your father? What indeed.

Augustine’s Confessions have long been a stumbling block to American liberal theology. When Charles Norris Cochrane penned his classic Christianity and Classical Culture, published in 1957, he argued that “modern liberal theology apparently finds Augustine almost wholly unintelligible.” He cites one A. C. MacGiffert, who wrote A History of Christian Thought, as typical: “In his doctrine of God and man and sin and grace, the curious combination of mystic piety, Neoplatonic philosophy, Manichean dualism, Christian tradition, strained exegesis, rigorous logic and glaring inconsistencies born of religious instincts and moral needs, can hardly be matched in the history of human thought.”¹⁰ American humanism had “no hesitation in denouncing” Augustine, Cochrane continues, for his supposed slighting of the intellect and his willful obscurantism. William James locates Augustine as a classical example of “the discordant personality,” waxing eloquent about “his half-pagan, half-Christian bringing-up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent scepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life. . . .” Then comes the famous moment, the voice in the garden saying “tolle, lege” and Augustine’s “inner storm” is laid to rest, or so James suggests. For James, what Augustine offers to later generations is an unsurpassed account of the trouble of “having a divided self.”¹¹ Take note that it is Augustine’s “divided self,” not an account of that division which simply is the human condition after the Fall and before the end-time, that gap when humanity is squeezed in temporality, marked by finitude, and unable to cast off the noetic effects of sin.

Traveling down the path sketched earlier by James, but without his urgency and insight, subsequent psychological commentators set up Augustine’s as the story of a diseased psyche. Augustine’s mother, the formidable Monica, looms rather large, to say the least; the “two cities” become subjectivized as unresolved parts of Augustine’s psyche; mater ecclesia is the overbearing mother he finally permits himself to be engulfed by, on and on. As Cochrane rightly notes, the overriding passion of Augustine’s life—the passion for tru...