Augustine and the Limits — of Politics —
Jean Bethke Elshtain Foreword by Patrick J. Deneen
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America First edition published in 1995 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 1941–2013, author. Title: Augustine and the limits of politics / Jean Bethke Elshtain ; foreword by Patrick J. Deneen. Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Series: Catholic ideas for a secular world | Originally published: c1995. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018031026 (print) | LCCN 2018031165 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268074524 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268161149 (epub) | ISBN 9780268006457 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268006458 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268020019 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354–430—Political and social views. | Christianity and politics. | Christianity and politics—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30-600. Classification: LCC BR1720.A9 (ebook) | LCC BR1720.A9 E57 2018 (print) | DDC 320.092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031026
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—— C O N T E N T S ——
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Preface: A Village of the Mind
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1. Why Augustine? Why Now?
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2. The Earthly City and Its Discontents
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3. Against the Pridefulness of Philosophy
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4. Augustine’s Evil; Arendt's Eichmann
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5. “Our business within this common mortal life”: Augustine and a Politics of Limits
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Epilogue: Loving Crazy Horse and Augustine
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Notes
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Bibliographical Note
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Index
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F O R E WO R D TO T H E 2 0 1 8 E D I T I O N
Jean Bethke Elshtain and the Limits of Political Theory A Preface to Augustine and the Limits of Politics
We live again in the most Augustinian of times. Confusion and unsettlement about current political arrangements are pervasive, with a widespread sense of gloom about the prospects for continued stability, peace, and prosperity. The period of Pax Americana is aging toward senescence, and voices from every direction on the political spectrum express plausible scenarios of a post-liberal future with alternating tones of hope and fear. While our political condition is not yet quite as dramatic as those during the years when Augustine lived, from 386–430— with the sack of Rome in 410 by invading armies from the north marking the decisive beginning of the end of a seemingly eternal empire—still, the American empire seems to be undergoing a similar internal decay manifested in political corruption, spiritual ennui, and titanic economic inequality. Parallels between Rome and America have always been popular—even the Founding Fathers encouraged the comparison—but now, more often than not, it’s not Rome’s power and world-girdling rule that inspires comparisons, but its civilization-shattering decline and fall. For all the radical differences between our age and Augustine’s, he would likely feel at home in our age of political uncertainty and fraying civic confidence. His answer to this condition, now as then, would be much the same. He would point to the unchanging demands of the biblical faith he came to embrace as an adult, both setting sights high for one’s divine home while lowering expectations for the earthly realm. Yet it’s fair to say that xi
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it would take him some time to recognize the difference in today’s audience, one likely far less Christian and, even then, far more worldly than the audience he was accustomed to addressing. His diagnosis and prescription remain invaluable, but his way of thinking and speaking are more difficult for modern ears to hear. Fortunately, we have a masterful modern translator on hand. That updated answer was distilled over twenty years ago for a modern audience by the political theorist and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain in her Loyola Covey Lectures and subsequent book, Augustine and the Limits of Politics. Her book is arguably more needful now than even when it was written in the mid-1990s, in retrospect a time of relative stability, prosperity, and even national confidence. Her effort to distill Augustine’s political message was more prophetic than even she might have anticipated, though she knew better than most that Augustine’s teachings are perennial and will never expire as long as humans remain alltoo-human. A Theological-Political Turn The year 1995 was a banner one for Jean Bethke Elshtain. During that year she concluded her academic appointment at Vanderbilt University, where she had been the first woman to hold an endowed chair. Later in that year, she began teaching at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago where, until her death in 2013, she held the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Chair in Social and Political Ethics. She had gained widespread notice due to the 1994 publication of her bestselling book Democracy on Trial, which was issued in paperback in that subsequent year. Also in 1995, the University of Notre Dame Press published her revised Loyola Covey Lectures, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, which she had delivered in 1994. Organized over some twenty years at Loyola University in Chicago, the Covey Lectures hosted an extraordinary list of speak-
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ers from the first rank of political theory and intellectual history, many of whom went on to publish important books arising from those lectures. Among the speakers that were hosted under its auspice were Michael Walzer, Benjamin Barber, Theodore Lowi, Tracy Strong, and Michael Zuckert. Jean Bethke Elshtain was among the small number of women who were invited, and she used the occasion to extend her scholarship into a wholly new and seemingly unfashionable area of inquiry: political theology. As with much of her previous work, her interest proved to be prescient, occupying vitally important intellectual space well in advance of many who would arrive later and moreover in ways that remained relevant not only because she was among the first to stake a claim but also because she was invariably the most penetrating and insightful. Elshtain had made her name initially for books published on the status—or, too often, lack of status—of women in the history of Western political thought. Her 1981 book Public Man, Private Woman was an early contribution on a subject now well established in political theory: the relative absence of public role or political presence for women throughout the long history of political thought and, more, the way that Western political thought had been predicated on this absence. She followed this book with Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt and a host of essays and articles on feminist topics that were eventually collected in her 1997 collection of essays, Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life. In these writings, Elshtain displayed a fierce independence from academic trends, at once blazing a new course in the creation of feminist approaches to political philosophy while also willingly criticizing aspects of feminist thinking that she believed to be ultimately destructive of the prospects for shared political and civic life, particularly a radicalized feminism that she believed dangerously attacked the family as the root of all social and political oppression.1 Her subsequent work branched out into areas where few women worked, particularly theories of war and peace, with a
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special interest in ethical dimensions of these questions that gave rise to a series of works on Just War theory. Among her more powerful reflections were those on the effects and impact of war upon women and children, and a special focus at the time upon the “Mothers of the Disappeared” and their extraordinary ethical witness in a murderous regime. Elshtain’s theological engagement was both unexpected and unsurprising. Were she to have followed a somewhat predictable academic path, she could easily have spent the remainder of her career working on the areas that she had carved out, particularly the growing field of feminist political thought. She was almost alone in bringing some of those insights to issues of war and peace. Yet what she was to describe as her “theological turn” was also already discernible in her early work. Reviewing her intellectual path in the preface to her 2000 book Who Are We?, Elshtain noted her longstanding attention to Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther, as well as to the tradition of Christian Just War ethics as part of that early feminist and Just War focus. She noted as well that she had been reading Augustine since her late teens, part of a personal engagement with Christian theology born of her Lutheran upbringing and of ongoing development of her personal faith. But her “theological turn” inaugurated by the Covey Lectures and this book arising from those lectures was born of an intensifying dissatisfaction with what she came to regard as the false divide between political theory and theology. “The rigid separation of theology and politics— a division on the level of thought somewhat akin to the ‘wall’ between church and state advanced by one strand of American jurisprudence—meant that thinkers who ought not to have been set apart were sundered and that fruitful and important engagements did not occur.” More, Elshtain explained that her “theological turn dovetail[ed] with my long held view that we must tend explicitly to the reigning descriptions and vocabularies under which our activities—as persons, communities, and cultures—go forward.”2 For most humans at most times, this
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involved a profound and inextricable religious engagement that was not subject to neat separation and compartmentalization, so much a hallmark of late liberal philosophy. Elshtain’s preternatural resistance to what was “expected” led her to places where few had explored and opened up new fields that many were amazed hadn’t been already completely mined. It might be superficially surprising that Elshtain’s two major works of the years 1994–1995 were, on the one hand, a bestselling work of political theory—Democracy on Trial—that decried trends toward political and civic fragmentation and called for a renewal of a democratic ethos and support for a vibrant civil society; and, on the other, a study of the theologian most renowned for urging a form of psychic distance from any City of Man and instead a focus upon the ultimate citizenship in the City of God. How can one make sense of her simultaneous work on two books devoted to such seemingly opposite goals? Democracy on Trial spoke to deep anxieties about political fragmentation and atomization, especially a growing body of evidence—supplied, among others, by Robert Putnam in his article and then book Bowling Alone—that Tocqueville’s warning of the dangers of democratic individualism to a shared civic life would prove democracy’s downfall. That book also addressed the concerns that had earlier been sounded by Allan Bloom and continue today, warning about the divisive nature of “multiculturalism” (or, today, “identity politics”) that separated the American polity into warring tribes. Elshtain’s book was not only about the breakdown of civic and political life among the citizenry but also the hijacking of democracy by an elite. Indeed, she understood the two conditions to be connected. As the domain of shared democratic life shrank due to expansion of rule by distant experts, the possibility of democracy as educative, dialogic, moderating, and supportive of practices of solidarity gave way to insistent univocal demands for recognition and respect. Such demands were born of political weakness and a felt sense of powerlessness, not from po-
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sitions of strength. Democracy was throttled from above and below, its necessary uncertainties and irresolvabilities rejected in favor of the anti-politics of asserted identities and faceless bureaucracies. In essence, Democracy on Trial insisted that the practice of politics was only possible with widespread recognition of the limits of politics. For Elshtain, democracy was premised upon a society’s mutual recognition that politics was permanently ongoing and never subject to any definitive answer or resolution. Her book concludes with a critique of utopianism as both impossible and wholly undesirable. Quoting Isaiah Berlin, she agreed that “Utopia cannot be Utopia, for then the perfect society will not perfectly satisfy everyone.” Instead, she wrote, “democrats know better: democracy is precisely an institutional, cultural, habitual way of acknowledging the pervasiveness of conflict and the fact that our loyalties are not one; our wills are not single; our opinions are not uniform; our ideals are not cut from the same cloth.”3 The Augustinian Revival Here one sees the similarities of the two works published in 1995, and why Elshtain’s interest extended especially to Augustine’s ancient yet perennial teachings. Elshtain recognized that while Augustine’s exacting and difficult standard is a standing challenge to political societies, his study of the journey of the City of Man on earth was not directly a work of political theory. His massive theological history of Rome offered relatively little practical advice about political arrangements, seeming instead to offer only a withering critique of most political societies as deeply immoral or, at best, minimally decent enough to allow temporary conditions of relative peace. In contrast to the political thinkers Augustine admired—especially Cicero—The City of God presented no evaluation of regimes, no discussion of political virtues or qualities of leadership, no political programs that might improve
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social conditions or economic productivity. If anything, Augustine seems to have written an anti-political book, one not only on the limits of politics, but about the futility of all human cities. In one of the more charming parts of this book, Elshtain admits that this “pessimistic” reading was the standard interpretation of Augustine that was prevalent during her education and that she in turn presented in an impromptu set of classroom lectures on Augustine’s thought early in her career (19–24). Such meager offerings for a liberal regime, she concluded in these lectures, explained why Augustine “is not a central figure for most political theorists” (22). It took the course of several decades and deeper plunges into the full dimension of Augustine’s writings for Elshtain to realize that this caricature of Augustine as a largely irrelevant political pessimist was woefully inaccurate and obscured the deeper resources offered by an engagement with Augustine for an age that was prone especially to oscillations between extreme political pessimism and overweening utopianism. It was precisely the mixed character of Augustine’s understanding of political possibilities that Elshtain sought to bring out to the fore in her Covey lectures. Augustine, like Plato and Cicero, was an “anti-utopian” who nevertheless insisted upon the relevance of the standard of perfect yet unachievable justice.4 What for Plato and Cicero were philosophic standards of justice, especially embodied in the aspiration to a perfected form of knowledge of the Good gained through philosophic investigation, Augustine articulated in Christian terms as a theological distinction between the fallen City of Man and the salvific City of God. In contrast to those who believed that earth might be made into a heaven, Augustine cautioned that we are inescapably pilgrims in this imperfect and imperfectible world. But in contrast to those who said that such ideal standards were therefore irrelevant and all that mattered was power and dominion in this world, Augustine insisted that the worldly domain should be rightly oriented to the standards of divine love. To those who held that a return to the old pagan gods might make Rome great again,
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Augustine responded that, by the standard of selfless love and humility offered by the City of God, Rome was never great. Augustine sought to hold together what modern humans so often put asunder: the intermingling and inseparability of the City of God and the City of Man in the saeculum, leading to the inescapable need for a capacity to chasten our utopian impulses while resisting despair. While this dual requirement was not merely, nor even most importantly, a political approach, Augustine’s conclusions about our mixed condition had important political implications that Elshtain was among the first academic political theorists to draw out. Elshtain understood that while Augustine offered perhaps above all a form of political caution—a kind of realism that is a hallmark of Elshtain’s own political thinking, exemplified in her interest in Just War theory—that even amid this realism there was still ample room for political possibility and hope. A key passage explicating Augustine’s understanding on this dual response reads: [Augustine offers] a via negativa, above all. By that I mean: Augustine displays the negative of ideology by articulating a canny and scrupulous attunement to the here and now with its very real limits. There are affirmations that flow from his negation of positive philosophy. Augustine creates a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty and love and care, as well as for a chastened form of civic virtue. If Augustine is a thorn in the side of those who would cure the universe once and for all, he similarly torments cynics who disdain any project of human community, or justice, or possibility. (91)
Elshtain had seen modern politics oscillate between twin poles of hubristic euphoria (e.g., 1968 or the rise of communism) as well as anti-political despair (the 1970s and, in her view, the rise of tribalistic “multiculturalism” in the 1990s). Were she to have lived to witness our political condition today, she would be unsurprised that contemporaries continue to fall prey to the temptations of political hopelessness and optimism. Yet, in light of a deep pall that has fallen over the liberal democracies of the West
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in the wake of the election of Trump, Brexit, and the rise of nationalist and even racialist politics, Elshtain would especially emphasize caution against the vice of hopelessness and emphasize more the possibilities and vistas of politics. Like Aristotle advising that the “middle course” never means aiming exactly in the middle, one must instead, like Odysseus, gauge where the great danger lies, and tack closer to Charybdis than Scylla if one wishes for the journey to continue. Just as we can discern how in Democracy on Trial Elshtain sought at once to offer encouragement for a form of civic democracy that understood its permanently imperfectible condition, in Augustine and the Limits of Politics we can see with greater clarity how her effort to revive a more Augustinian disposition to politics might offer counsel to our age, which seems to be losing hope in democracy. Echoing arguments that she explored with her dear friend Christopher Lasch but that were even more deeply present in the work of Augustine, Elshtain understood that optimism and despair were different sides of the same coin. We live in times that would be altogether familiar: having come through a period of certain political euphoria in which “history” was increasingly seen to have an inevitable arc and for which a recent president was apt to use—and to be described by his supporters in— Messianic terms, Elshtain would be little surprised to see an immediate oscillation to political hopelessness and despair as those hopes seemed dashed. The millennial generation that was only recently lauded for its greater engagement and hope for politics expressed in their enthusiastic support for President Obama shows evidence today of declining confidence in democracy, a greater willingness to entertain a politics without elections, and a marked increase in apathy and political disillusionment.5 Such sentiment is given scholarly credibility in an anti-democratic current of academic thinking that was once prevalent before World War II and has become newly fashionable again, exemplified in calls for rule by an “epistocracy” in preference to democratic elections advanced in a recent book entitled Against Democracy.6
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Especially in the final chapter of this book—entitled “‘Our business within this common mortal life’: Augustine and a Politics of Limits”—Elshtain stresses Augustine’s positive political vision, one that is grounded in his unceasing cognition of the limits of politics. It is within the limits of politics that possibilities of politics arise; indeed, politics is a domain where we can already anticipate a form of participation in the “whole” that is promised ultimately in the City of God. Though an earthly reconciliation between the “Many” and the “One” will always elude us, for most humans—Christian or secular, man or woman, optimist or pessimist—it will be through our common life that we at least negotiate what we share and what is unique. Glossing a sermon by Augustine on human difference and commonality, Elshtain writes “there is something like a common nature and it is this thread of commonality that supports both individuals and plurality; . . . that helps us to preserve the space between us—out of one, many ones, each a new beginning; yet these many ones share a nature in common” (104). Augustine Against Modern Pagans? Elshtain re-introduced Augustine to an overwhelmingly secular academy, and amid a secularizing culture, in a way that could offer political counsel to contemporary readers regardless of one’s theological disposition. She was correct, both substantively and strategically, that Augustine could be fruitfully read and that his political cautions and admonitions could be adopted by believers and nonbelievers alike. She sought to illuminate how Augustine could be put valuably into conversation with some of her favored intellectual interlocutors, particularly Camus and Arendt, to amplify and elucidate Augustine’s resonance for readers who might initially conclude that an ancient Catholic bishop and a doctor of the church might have little to say to liberal democrats. Yet Augustine himself was especially concerned to defend Christianity from the charge that it was responsible for the fall of
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the Roman Empire, and instead to insist that it was a fatal flaw present at Rome’s founding—particularly the sin of pride—that was the source of its ultimate downfall. Confronted by signs of its own mortality, the elite of Rome blamed Christianity for Rome’s manifest weakness, especially the internal division that Christian loyalty to heaven over Rome appeared to foster. Augustine’s magisterial response to this accusation, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, was the fruit of deep philosophical, theological, and historical reflection, requiring a decade and a half for completion. Augustine posed a fundamentally different standard by which to evaluate the success or failure of earthly cities by asking: what are the objects of love that define the purpose of your city, your nation, your empire? Anything short of the love of God and neighbor would fall short—and so, all human cities must fall short—but Rome, considered by many to be the greatest political achievement of human history, was especially damned by this standard. If Machiavelli would effectively praise the Roman Republic because its inner logic demanded its expansion ultimately to a world-straddling empire, Augustine similarly concluded—albeit in a stance of condemnation—that “Rome was never a republic.” Rome was always driven by the fatal sin of libido dominandi, the lust for dominion, and the belief by pagans that the fault lay in Christianity reflected a characteristic inability to reflect with humility upon its own society’s inherent flaws. Augustine’s was also a caution specifically to Christians, a warning not to identify fully with any city except that ultimate and final city, the City of God. While the City of God is destined to travel alongside the City of Man for the duration of the saeculum, it was a special responsibility of Christians both to discern as best as possible the distinction between the two cities and to remain firmly committed pilgrims in the earthly domain in anticipation of final citizenship in that ultimate city. This was not to say that Christians were not also called to be good citizens of the earthly city where they found themselves, but to maintain a certain
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psychic distance from any city and to resist if any temporal city demanded ultimate allegiance in contradiction to Christian belief. We live again in Augustinian times especially in light of the relevance of this ancient argument to contemporary political and theological developments. The world-straddling empire of the modern era appears to be entering decline, and a political battle is currently being waged that, according to one party, claims that Christianity is a contributing factor and welcomes its demise, while another party calls for Christians to take up the cause of restoring America to its former glory by restoring a Christian republic. Augustine would immediately recognize, and disapprove, of both these claims. One wonders how Elshtain might respond to these recent developments. While America’s perceived decline is often attributed more to political, economic, and military phenomena, today’s secular elites—some, self-described “pagans”7—are nevertheless also remarkably hostile to Christians, viewed by the arbiters of contemporary norms as backwards and on the “wrong side of history.” Many secularists celebrate the declining fortunes of Christians, viewing them as a remnant of a backwards and oppressive belief-system.8 The response by many traditional Christians today have taken two dominant forms: the call to political activism, especially the effort to support political leaders who will reinvigorate the flames of Christendom, even through support of morally dubious leaders such as Donald Trump; and forms of psychic and even geographic retreat, a response captured in the widely read and discussed book The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. I suspect Elshtain would brook neither. Elshtain was at times overly confident in the compatibility of Christianity and liberalism, but insisted that liberalism would likely only flourish informed by the chastening influence especially of Augustinian-inflected religious belief. A wholly secular state could not be counted upon to limit itself; rather, it was only in cognizance of a horizon beyond the saeculum that the state would properly limit its claims, particularly eschewing any claims
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to knowledge of ultimate ends and purposes of people who were always more than citizens. She would almost certainly reiterate her cautions articulated throughout this book to both “liberal” and “conservative” Christians who identified their theology too closely with any particular political cause. But she would almost certainly invoke Augustine as a caution against the calls for Christian withdrawal from public life in favor of a form of religious and cultural purity. Augustine is often seen as an arch political “realist,” particularly in his recognition that political life calls at times for “dirty hands,” famously describing in a passage in Book XIX of City of God the unavoidable duty of a judge to declare guilt and innocence—and even order the torture of prisoners—without knowing for certain whether his judgments will be correct, whether an innocent man might be imprisoned or executed or a guilty man be let free.9 Elshtain would have insisted that part of the Christian vocation was the vocation of a citizen in the City of Man, recognizing both the limits of such a station as well as its possibilities. To Christians who might urge a form of effective withdrawal from the affairs of public life, Elshtain would have pointed out that Augustine didn’t distinguish merely between heaven and earth, but between cities—civitate of God and of Men. Our heavenly existence is prefigured by our lives in the cities of men, or at least the natural sociability and mutual need and insufficiency that such a life in an earthly city ideally calls to mind and anticipates our condition as full citizens of the City of God. Even as she would doubtless deploy Augustine to chasten Christians, Elshtain would have saved her most trenchant criticism for an increasingly strident secular world for its acrimony and hostility toward Christianity. I suspect she would trace efforts either to isolate Christianity to the private realm and thereby make it entirely consonant with a political project of “social justice,” or to call for its outright suppression as evidence of the eternal temptation of political pride, especially directed against the one live alternative that would urge humility about belief in politics
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as providing an ultimate solution to the irresolveable condition of being a human. She would see this impulse as the flip-side of the call among some Christians to attain a purity through withdrawal from politics. Indeed, the two are just new expressions of the inextricable optimism and pessimism that too often defines our political options, and which must be resisted not merely by positing their opposite but by rejecting that these are actually viable options. The re-publication of this remarkably contemporary text could not be better timed. While Augustine’s lessons remain perennial, it is Elshtain’s gloss that helps us understand just how necessary and urgent is a renewed consideration of his challenging teachings for a modern age. In an era prone to excesses especially of pessimism punctuated by occasional unsustainable optimism, it is the combination of Augustinian humility and hope that is needed. Jean Bethke Elshtain helped to articulate anew this timeless teaching over twenty years ago, yet reading her again, it appears she wrote it only yesterday as a guide to our contemporary challenges. Reading her again after too many years since her voice was stilled, one wishes that Jean were still with us today. The words that follow are both a reminder of how much we have lost, yet how very much of her wise counsel remains during this ongoing trial of democracy. PAT R I C K J . D E N E E N
University of Notre Dame Notes 1. “Feminists Against the Family,” in Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 145–64. 2. Who Are We? Critical Reflections and Hopeful Possibilities (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 2000), x. 3. Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 113. 4. Elshtain held that Plato was a utopian thinker, a position she laid out in Private Man, Public Woman and maintained throughout her career.
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In particular, she read The Republic less as a warning about the limits of politics than a commendation to its overcoming. I read Plato differently, and my suggestion here is that Augustine is closer to Plato as an antiutopian thinker than Jean herself would have acknowledged. 5. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yasha Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3 (July 2016): 5–17. 6. Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). For a description of comparable loss of “democratic faith” during the first decades of the twentieth century, see Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013). 7. Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 8. Hemant Mehta, “Yes, Christianity is Dying and Conservative Leaders Are Avoiding the Most Obvious Solution,” http://www.patheos.com /blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/05/18/yes-christianity-is-dying-and-con servative-leaders-are-avoiding-the-most-obvious-solution. 9. For a modern gloss on this famous passage, see Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (Winter 1973): 20–40.