Augustine's Readable City: Beyond the Politics of
Empire
C.C. Pecknold,
University of Cambridge
I. Towards a Postliberal Political
Theology
There is a strong desire for unity in democracy.
Think of the American flag after September
11th. At the heart of the glorious
American experiment is the desire to unite multiple
faiths in the one, true democratic faith.I read this
push for unity in diversity as an eschatological
desire, that is to say, a theological one.
In contemporary debates, there is on the one hand
Jeffrey Stout teaching us the virtues of democracy
and democratic faith. And on the other, Stanley
Hauerwas, who no longer seems set on thinking that
democracy is a bad idea, but clearly believes that
the Church has no fundamental stake in sustaining the
liberal social orders. I find myself convinced that
both are right, and yet remain unsure of how to
navigate between Emersonian, Augustinian and Barthian
responses in this debate.[1] That leaves me in a
patient posture—but also an urgent one. We will stay
with these problems of democracy, but we need to
begin thinking them through in more deeply
theological ways. I share the long-term view that the
problems are only going to become more acute.
What are those problems? Contemporary democracy
seems unwilling to do at least two things: (1) It
seems unwilling to draw deeply from the wells of
tradition, veiling a modern antagonism towards the
past. And (2) it seems unable, but not necessarily
unwilling, to deal with multiple sources. It is
casual about multiplicity, and for reasons related to
its eschatological desire for unity, unable to deal
adequately with religious reasons that constitute and
are constituted by multiple communities of faith.
Sheldon Wolin and the 'radical democrats' have
been pointing us in some fruitful directions,
encouraging us to attend to the grassroots, to the
actual and multiple sources of our political culture.
They have encouraged us to look towards the
'micropolitical' — or the small ways in which
political judgements are shaped.[2]
This response to problems with contemporary
democracy seems right to me, but perhaps not radical
enough. Any ethnographic attentiveness to the
communities of scriptural faith which make up the
vast majority of the population should display that
the authoritative sources are sacred scriptures and
the traditions generated by them. The micropolitical
that interests the radical democrats may be best
displayed through an analysis of how political
judgements are formed through small, interpretive
acts in tradition shaped communities.
The thesis is simple:reading skills are political
skills, and the reading of scripture is the training
ground for reading the political. That is to link
scriptural hermeneutics and reading practices with
the generation of political culture. In this, I am
working towards a postliberal political theology
which encourages faithful Christians to make public
their deepest reasons, which is also to say to make
their reasoning publicly accountable to those who
reason differently. This is to look forward to a
different form of civic life than we presently
face.
One of the promises of the practice of 'scriptural
reasoning' is that it may help model a different
relation of unity and diversity in which traditions
and the sources of traditions can fully face one
another and converse in political friendships that
seek political wisdom together. The rest of my paper
looks at these issues indirectly. I provide some
scriptural texts, and then I offer a reading of
Augustine's The City of God which displays how
that work performs a creative interpretation and a
political logic that will have significant
implications.
Two of the key texts are worth considering in
their 'plain sense' before advancing to Augustine's
reading.
In the beginning when God created the
heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void
and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a
wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then
God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light.
And God saw that the light was good; and God
separated the light from the darkness. God called the
light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And
there was evening and there was morning, a first
day. Genesis 1:1-5
Let the same mind be in you that was in
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be
exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a
slave, being born in human likeness. And being bound
in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient
to the point of death—even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him
the name that is above every name, so that at the
name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and
on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of
God the Father. Philippians 2.5-11
II. The Narrative Substructures of The City of
God: Generative Political Tendencies
Unlike some readers, I do not read The City of
God as a tale of two cities: the city of Man and
the city of God. Careful readers will note, it is at
least the tale of three cities: Rome, Jerusalem, and
Babylon, and the narratival inter-relationships of
these cities is complex. The City of God is a
conversation between the multiple, authoritative
sources of these cities. There are those scriptural
texts from Genesis, the Psalms, Isaiah, the Gospels,
and Paul's letters. But there are also the Roman
city's own authoritative texts: mainly Cicero, Varro,
Seneca, Porphyry, Plato, and the imperial scripture
itself, Virgil's Aeneid. Augustine pays
attention to sources, and throughout the whole of
The City of God, he hopes to teach us how to
read the city, and put theological pressure on the
political order through those texts which are
generative of their political cultures.
The pressure that Augustine applies in these first
ten books is primarily a monotheistic pressure from
the inside of the Roman narrative. But it is not
quite right to say that he speaks to Rome only on her
own terms that would be to somehow veil his own
reasons, which Augustine never does. He believes that
the God of Israel is the founder of the true Rome.
What enables him to find an intimate relationship
between the empirical city of Rome, and the biblical
category of Jerusalem? Like other ancient thinkers,
Augustine holds together the City, the Soul, and the
Cosmos, and just as the Soul can find its true
identity by searching more deeply within its life for
God's logic, so too can the City find its true
identity by a deeper examination of its life through
the sources of its life. Augustine performs for the
Roman city what he performs for himself in the
Confessions: a kind of askesis, or a process
of disciplined learning that is redemptively directed
towards the deepest political resources.
This narrative of Roman identity shifts towards
another narrative that works both within and beyond
Rome's local history through the practices of the
church in that city. And here we see Augustine move
from the City to the Cosmos, for it is clear that
Augustine moves in this second half to a narrative
which provides critical tools for reading the
political signs of the Roman city through a
heightened pitch of attention to the scriptural
universe. There is a real conversation at work
between the first and second half of The City of
God. Though Rome is not included in the two,
within this cosmic, or scriptural universe, there are
indeed two cities: they are, in fact, the biblical
categories of Jerusalem and Babylon, which I read as
socio-political tendencies. Some, such as J.N.
Figgis, have suggested that Augustine gets the two
cities idea from the Book of Revelation, but in fact,
he sees it through the whole of the scriptural
narrative.[3] He reads the scriptures
as a narrative about two primordial polities
commingled throughout time, and generative of Rome
itself.The key word here remains "commingled": if
these two political tendencies are commingled in
every city, and they are difficult to discern, what
will be required to cultivate citizens capable of the
good and just society?
Careful readers of The City of God should
not find any of this surprising. But my reading of
the two cities as generative political tendencies
within the scriptural universe may be offering
something helpful: the point is not to obsess about
dyads, or to fixate exclusively on some sense of
cities or communities in conflict. The point is to
learn how to read the signs of the political good in
every city, that is, to become skilled readers of the
political in order that we might be led to the
kingdom of charity, to be led in our political
decisions through the orders of love, through the
sources which have generated our forms of life and
wisdom.[4]
What this means is that a political education is
required to put corrective or redemptive pressure on
the babylonian tendencies of all our political lives,
through performing those redemptive Jerusalem
tendencies which so often allude us, even in the
empirical Jerusalem, even in the empirical church.
But what sort of political education, what sort of
askesis is needed?
III. Genesis and the Scriptural Logic that
Generates The City of God
There is something right about the suggestion that
Augustine gets his idea of the two cities from the
Book of Revelation. The something right is the
eschatologically-inflected attention to the
narrative. But it must be said that Augustine
struggles to read Genesis more than he reads any
other text of Scripture. Though he was reasoning
eschatologically, he was listening for the generative
logic of creation.
Books 11 through 14 of The City of God
display what Augustine takes to be the engine upon
which all political life depends, the creation of
angelic and human beings imbued with the gift of
freedom, and delegated with power. The Devil is the
primordial instantiation of this freedom and power
misused. On Augustine's account, God made the Devil,
but did not make him wicked. That he did all
by himself, Augustine says, by misusing his freedom
and power, turning in upon himself solipcistically,
and swelling with "the pride of independence". For
Augustine, this pride-rendered angelic fall precedes
the human fall. Indeed, when Augustine turns his
attention to the Garden of Eden, his interpretation
here is charged with the suggestion that Adam and Eve
could have turned things around for creation.He just
about suggests that Adam and Eve had a brief chance
to redeem the whole of creation, and undo the Devil's
declaration of independence simply by cleaving to
God, using their freedom to participate in God's
glory through a politics of humility. But alas,
Augustine suggests that such a reversal awaits the
new Adam: our political cure.
And yet, the constant refrain of the first chapter
of Genesis is that everything is good. There's
nothing wrong. So how does he find a Fall in the
angelic community preceding the Fall in the human
one? This is an interpretive puzzle as there seems to
be no narrative of a Fall until Genesis chapter 3,
and then it is the human Fall. What is going on here?
It is important to pay attention to Augustine's
powers of biblical reasoning here because they
generate micropolitical judgments that have
extraordinary consequences. Augustine asks the
difficult questions of the text: where did this
serpent suddenly come from in chapter 3? If things
are created, and seen to be created as good, why is
there this serpent in a Garden tempting Adam and Eve
to misuse their freedom and power and declare their
independence? There seems to be a problem with the
text: we are not being given the whole story.
Augustine does not try to explain his way around this
problem, but rather he seeks a deeper engagement with
the first chapter, where he believes the text yields
signs of the necessary back-story. He pushes
especially hard on those texts which testify to
origins, especially the first day. He keeps asking
the question that the text itself seems to ask: if
creation is good, what made the first evil
will bad? (12.6) The only answer, he thinks, is that
it must be some tendency away from the good. The only
ground for defection from God seems to be in the
formless void, the nihilo out of which God
creates. As others have noted, this is to refuse to
explain evil, to refuse it a causative nature. This
leads Augustine to his powerful theological claim,
not just for creatio ex nihilo, but for his idea that
the first evil will is a privation of the good, a
turning away from the source of goodness, and thus a
way of cutting creation off from its deepest wells of
life. Augustine reads this as a political
tendency towards privacy, solipsism and pride. From
this reasoning, it becomes easier to see Augustine's
back-story for why the serpent appears in the Garden.
The Serpent is an instantiation of this political
tendency towards superbia, the prideful
swelling of self-love choked off from the source of
its created goodness.
Two political tendencies, Augustine reasons,
derive from that very first day, from the very first
verses of the first chapter of Genesis: from the
division of Light and Dark. Hardly the literal sense:
'Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was
light.And God saw that the light was good; and God
separated the light from the darkness." (Gen 1.3-4)
Augustine reads these verses as the creation of the
heavens, or the creation of the angelic orders, and
so reads Light and Dark socio-politically. But why so
far from the plain sense? Augustine has deep reasons
for this. He believes that good semiotic performance
is ruled by the incarnation of the Word made flesh.
So any dyadic logic in the plain sense will be
problematic, and will stimulate him to display his
deeper incarnational logic (otherwise unspoken) for
the sake of a politics of redemption in which
Jerusalem redeems Babylon in the drama of Roman
history.
The babylonian tendency remains privation of the
good — but it is a realistic recognition that it is a
political tendency in human action which needs to be
corrected, repaired, redeemed through an
incarnational hermeneutic. But the point about their
being commingled from the very origins is to suggest
how difficult it is to identify and properly
distinguish these tendencies in the actual histories
of socio-political life, even if we know their
destinies. Some political education is required to
learn how to read the city, some education which will
shape readers to perform the redemptive logic of the
Incarnation in the world; indeed, to perform the
politics of Jesus.
IV. Philippians and the political askesis of
humility
Augustine writes from the outset that he has
embarked on a great and arduous work in writing on
'the glorious city of God.' There is, of course, no
more loaded term in the Roman political lexicon than
the word 'glorious.' But as he knows, God's glory
works differently from Roman glory: namely, it works
through humility. Always the rhetorician impressed by
the humility of the scriptures, Augustine writes in
his preface:
'For I am aware what ability is requisite to
persuade the proud how great is the virtue of
humility, which raises us, not by a human arrogance,
but by a divine grace, above all earthly dignities
that totter on this shifting scene. For the King and
Founder of this city of which we speak, has in
Scripture uttered to His people a dictum of the
divine law in these words [from James 4.6 and
Proverbs 3.34]: "God resisteth the proud, but giveth
grace unto the humble."' (Preface).
He immediately follows the scriptural citation
with one from the Imperial scriptures, from Virgil's
Aeneid: 'Show pity to the humbled soul, and
crush the sons of pride.' And throughout the work,
this inter-textual pattern continues: not as a
rivalry between texts, but as a conversation between
political cultures that have access to deep
sources.[5] The hope is that the
conversation itself will be a kind of askesis that
disciplines the city's 'lust of rule,' and though
often neglected, the church's lust of rule too (I
read Hauerwas as performing this discipline in the
church). Augustine wants to teach a culture which
seems prone to babylonian political tendencies, 'a
way of life' that gives Rome access to another
authoritative source for its life that can enrich and
deepen a truer vision for Rome. Augustine seeks for
Rome the appropriate reference for 'glory,' as he
puts it, 'referring that glory itself to the glory of
God.'(5.14) But this leads Augustine back to the
pattern of God's glory he knows in the Christ of St
Paul's Letter to the Philippians, where he finds the
LORD who comes in the form of a servant to mediate
political wisdom on a Roman cross. Glory finds its
true reference only through the humility of Jesus
Christ.
Philippians 2.5-11 provides him with an
eschatological mapping of how God's political wisdom
is mediated in the world through Christ's cross where
humiliation meets exaltation. In turning to this
text, Augustine displays that his fundamental
political wisdom consists in a redemptive 'politics
of praise.'[6] In this sense,
Augustine aims to bring 'the mind of Christ' into a
profound relation to the Roman mind; not to absorb
Roman political culture, or even replace it, but to
give it access to a political education which can
better resource its people — or at a minimum, to
display how the redemptive 'mind of Christ' provides
Rome's Christian citizens with an ecclesial politics
which will enrich, broaden and deepen the life of the
people in that city.
At the end of Book 11, he comes full circle to the
scriptural text that opens The City of God,
namely the one from Proverbs 3.34 about pride and
humility: 'God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace
unto the humble.' It is the text he opens with, and
the text he places at the structural center of his
entire work. So who are the humble? At a minimum,
those who make themselves open to the judgment of the
other. But ultimately, the humble are those who make
themselves open to the judgment of God.The humble are
those who perform the redemptive semiotics of the
incarnate Word.
V. Democratic Vistas
For Augustine, Rome was an eschatological idea
bound up with the new Jerusalem. I'd like to say the
same for what Sheldon Wolin has called 'fugitive
democracy,' rare, episodic democracy.It is 'fugitive'
because it is eschatological: there is a truer
democracy than the liberal one we now know.
Augustine's whole project in The City of God
is about developing a political askesis of humility
which will renew and transform Rome. Above all, he
thought the rhetorical humility of scripture would
have the most transformative effect because it
mediated the humility of Jesus to the world.[7] He
believed that Rome's Christian citizens brought into
its political culture the resources for a political
education which could have this fructifying effect.
In retrospect we can say this pre-liberal attempt to
make divine revelation central to reason-exchange in
political culture worked to produce Christendom, but
in prospect, we will need to imagine a different
future for liberal democracies. What if liberal
democracies learned to live not only with a politics
of multiple communities, but a politics of multiple
traditions committed to enriching, broadening and
deepening political discussion through their own
authoritative sources and reasoning? If, as it seems
willing to do, liberal democracy can discipline its
desire for an independent source towards the actual
and multiple sources of political culture, from the
grassroots up, it may just begin to see not only how
the religions of biblical faith sustain political
culture, but how they offer the curriculum, the
education, the askesis which can not only discipline
democratic pride, but also give grace to democratic
humility.
ENDNOTES
[1] I am currently writing a
book on Augustine, Barth and Political Theory with
these urgent concerns in mind, and in response to
Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[2] See Sheldon Wolin,
Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in
Western Political Thought, Expanded Edition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and
Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly (Eds.)
Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the
Vicissitudes of the Political (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
[3] See J.N. Figgis, The
Political Aspects of S. Augustine's 'City of God'
(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1921).
[4] Cf. Augustine's
correspondence with Marcellinus, eg Letter 136/138
which supports this reading in E.M. Atkins and R.J.
Dodaro (Eds) Augustine:Political Writings
(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[5] See Sabine MacCormack,
The Shadows of Poetry: Virgil in the Mind of
Augustine (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998).
[6] I am indebted to Randi
Rashkover for this felicitous phrase. See her book
Revelation and Theopolitics:Karl Barth, Franz
Rosenzweig and the Poliitics of Praise (New York
& London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2005). The
'politics of praise' matches well Augustine's own
sense that God's just society must be performed in
the worshipping community.
[7] As Hauerwas suggests,
'humility' was Reinhold Niebuhr's great virtue, and
makes me aware that employing it here might
work against the narrative or postliberal political
theology I am working towards.Rather than avoid
humility simply because it was Niebuhr's virtue, I
want to press on it more, through the Carmen
Christi, through the politics of praise which
recognises the humility and obedience of Jesus
Christ, an obedience which leads to death, and to his
resurrected body. This is a humility which changes
the causative scope for what is politically possible
through an openness to judgment.
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