Augustine and the Limits of Politics

By Jean Bethke Elshtain and Patrick J. Deneen

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780268161149

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941–2013) was one of the nation's most prominent and provocative thinkers on religion, political philosophy, and ethics. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School, Political Science, and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. She was the author of numerous books, including Sovereignty: God, State, and Self.

Book preview

Augustine and the Limits of Politics

CATHOLIC IDEAS FOR A SECULAR WORLD

O. Carter Snead, series editor

The purpose of this interdisciplinary series is to feature authors from around the world who will expand the influence of Catholic thought on the most important conversations in academia and the public square. The series is Catholic in the sense that the books will emphasize and engage the enduring themes of human dignity and flourishing, the common good, truth, beauty, justice, and freedom in ways that reflect and deepen principles affirmed by the Catholic Church for millennia. It is not limited to Catholic authors or even works that explicitly take Catholic principles as a point of departure. Its books are intended to demonstrate the diversity and enhance the relevance of these enduring themes and principles in numerous subjects, ranging from the arts and humanities to the sciences.

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

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

To those who taught me well.

Behold, and again see if you can. Certainly you love only the good, because the earth is good by the height of its mountains, the moderate elevation of its hills, and the evenness of its fields; and good is the farm that is pleasant and fertile; and good is the house that is arranged throughout in symmetrical proportions and is spacious and bright; and good are the animals, animate bodies; and good is the mild and salubrious air; and good is the food that is pleasant and conducive to health; and good is health without pains and weariness; and good is the countenance of man with regular features, a cheerful expression, and a glowing color; and good is the soul of a friend with the sweetness of concord and the fidelity of love; and good is the just man; and good are riches because they readily assist us; and good is the heaven with its own sun, moon, and stars; and good are the angels by their holy obedience; and good is the lecture that graciously instructs and suitably admonishes the listener; and good is the poem with its measured rhythm and the seriousness of its thoughts.

Augustine, De Trinitate

—— CONTENTS ——

Foreword to the 2018 Edition

Preface: A Village of the Mind

1.   Why Augustine? Why Now?

2.   The Earthly City and Its Discontents

3.   Against the Pridefulness of Philosophy

4.   Augustine’s Evil; Arendt’s Eichmann

5.   Our business within this common mortal life: Augustine and a Politics of Limits

Epilogue: Loving Crazy Horse and Augustine

Notes

Bibliographical Note

Index

—— FOREWORD TO THE 2018 EDITION ——

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 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 all-too-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 speakers 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 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 ­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 best-selling 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 positions 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 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

Reviews for Augustine and the Limits of Politics

[jacobsbeloved · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book almost as much as the first book in the series. While in some trilogies, the middle book can feel like a "filler", this one was packed with more secrets, lies, and mind games to keep me guessing. So many secrets, where to begin!For starters, Orion's influence is not over yet, as he has a special message for Amy - and he couldn't keep it simple of course - there would be no plot otherwise. Then there is the mystery of the engine and what can be done about it. More secrets are revealed when Amy becomes curious about Elder's past, and the myriad secrets are only part of the problem.Since the power of Phydus is no more, unrest and discontent are brewing among the other members of the ship, questioning Elder's leadership and abilities, as well as Amy's strangeness and own influence over others. What is most intriguing to me while reading the novel was how so many of the ship's members completely lacked in wisdom and maturity thanks to the robotic-like existence under the influence of Phydus. While they were supposed to have learned from the problems in the history of Sol-Earth, they behaved rather predictably in the given situation with rioting, sexual deviance, violence, withholding of valuable goods, bribery, blackmail, etc. It causes me to wonder just how well such people can be expected to survive on a new planet... should they ever land on it.I cannot wait for Shades of Earth!