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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