[Review] Charles Mathewes' a Theology of Public Life (O'Donovan)

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A Theology of Public Life

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  • [PT 12.4 (2011) 616-620] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X doi:10.1558/poth.vl2i4.616 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

    BOOK REVIEW

    Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2007. 384 pp. 21.99. ISBN 978-0-521-53990-6 (pbk).

    Reviewed by: Oliver O'Donovan, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh [email protected]

    A school of political thought that self-identifies as Augustinian is a com-paratively new phenomenon (well surveyed recently in Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love). It is not "Augustinian" in the same way that some mid-twentieth-century theorists were "Thomists," while other thinkers wore the badge of "Calvinism." Those were real "traditions," Thomist or Calvinist by virtue of the intellectual cultures they emerged from. Seeking answers to pressing questions, their thinkers turned for illumination to the texts on which they had been educated and which they knew best. The Augustinians, by contrast, are a group of converts, not a "tradition" but a "movement," self-selected by certain intellectual deci-sions they have made in common. In the course of a modernity-critical pilgrimage in quest of dmystification, they have pressed upstream beyond the muddy tributaries of scholastic and renaissance rationalism to locate the uncontaminated sources of the Western tradition. As a result they are a heterogeneous crowd, assertive of their Augustinian identity because they have had to find it for themselves, but diverse in their interpretation of it and inclined to disagree with each other over almost everythingoften over the role of theology; sometimes, strange as it may seem, even over Christianity. They vary considerably in their knowledge of Augustine's writings. Yet there are common hallmarks: imperfectibility the weight of fundamental human motivations, reconciliation as a truth of ontology. They share, at least, many of the same enemies.

    Charles Mathewes' Augustinianism is a theological one. Appropriat-ing the ontological, anthropological and soteriological claims for which Augustine is best known, it argues their power to shed light on our social and political situation. The first of two large sections in his book is devoted to the appropriation, which is thorough; the ontology of the good, original sin, illuminisi epistemologa eschatology, all find their place in an

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    intelligent and well-articulated synthesis, held together by a focus upon participation in the world. This focus is narrowed in the second section, which aims to give sense to our participation in public life.

    Three principal chapters in this section draw their headings from the three theological virtues, speaking of "faithful," "hopeful" and "loving citizenship." The third of them would be my choice to illustrate the strengths of Mathewes' approach at its best. Pitching Augustine's conception of a loving politics over against the conflictual "agonism" of radical pluralism, the author explores the opposition of the two with patient and penetrating thoroughness, pressing persuasively towards the conclusion that only confidence in a unified and reconciling order can make pluralism possible at the practical level. For a believer to risk encounter with unbelief is to put his beliefs "in play" in the service of love, releasing them from his own grip for the neighbour to appropriate and build upon (280). Mathewes also has many original and stimulating things to say about political hope. The durationor "enduring" of time is a recurrent theme in the book, and the possibility that political events may come together into a kairos, disclosing, in transitory but vivid fashion, the purposes of God for all history, is both a warning against the liberal bureaucratization of politics and a summons to endless patience.

    It is not straight systematics, and not straight exposition of Augustine, but an apologetic for a modern Augustinian vision. The style is that of philosophical meditation: thought leading scholarship, rather than scholarship leading thought. It vindicates Mathewes' position as one of the most articulate and thoughtful of the Augustinian writers, equipped not only with a sharp critical eye but with an admirable dialectical capacity to encompass two sides of any argument. He inhabits his arguments rather than merely pursuing them. Rich in their recourse to metaphor, they run the risk of promoting complexity over clarity, but that is what makes them real arguments, not mere pleadings. They are not weighed down with intensive expositions of texts, not even those of Augustine, but when Mathewes wants to take us back to the sources, he knows where to go as one that is at home in them. More puzzling in a work of avowed theology is an absence of Scripture which is so complete that it can only be intentional. This leaves unanswered questions about how the author envisages the discipline of Christian theology when self-consciously attached to a tradition.

    Not "public theology," we are told, which is accommodationist, but a "theology of public life Looked at from the political angle, "public life" is a deliberate abstraction: it is politics without political institutions. Democracy is mentioned in the book only to disavow any attempt to discuss it. "Law" has no entry in the index, and neither does "party." To get behind

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    the state and its galaxy of dependent forms, to turn the spotlight on a foundational moment, when the "state of nature" is resolved into a "civil state"that has, of course, been the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow for most Western political philosophy since the renaissance. This book, too, has that very momentnot as a piece of legitimating archaeology, but as a moment to be constantly recaptured and relivedat the centre of its concern. Looked at from the theological angle, a "theology" of public life is an exercise of moral theology concerned with a duty owed the neigh-bour and, specifically, the duty owed the neighbour as community rather than as individual.

    "The public," a term made popular a generation ago by Hannah Arendt, has since become a peculiarly American shorthand for a peculiarly American idea. To express it crudely: the public is a kind of republic-before-the-republic, a foundational civic engagement that makes possible a set of subsequent political engagements. The "public" is a territory betwixt and between: on the one side it lays claim to the universal valid-ity of pre-political sociality; on the other it is already a seminal political form, promising a "recovery," i.e. re-enabling, re-foundation, "of politics" (157). Which is why Mathewes can say that "the political was precisely the concept that (Augustine) lacked," which means, correctly, that he did not envisage "public life" as the condition of the possibility of politics, but only envisaged the forms of actual political structure, "rule" or "government" (163). The dominant category of the public is "citizenship." From homes, markets and workplaces citizens assemble; they attend to their common business in a solemn unity of purpose, strengthened by religion; though they have still to resolve upon anything, even upon their own political forms, politics is already present in potentia. We cannot be in much doubt what kinds of political form are likely to emerge from that conception of primary human association.

    One cannot help envying the Americans their capacity to sustain an intelligent debate on the nature of the public, a debate to which this book represents an important contribution. Bringing together as it does so many intelligent voices from different locations on the intellectual spectrum, the debate is all the livelier for touching on what Americans instinctively feel to be most important about their own polity. But precisely for that reason it has a certain abstract unreality to some readers of British and European backgrounds. I am not the only one, I think, who finds conceptual dif-ficulty in speaking of "public life" in this way, which requires one to look, like Janus, simultaneously in two directions, at spontaneous sociality on the left and at structured institutions on the right, and to see the two hori-zons merging into one. The discussion seems to overlay one thing with anotherso that when we think we are at liberty to discuss human society

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    we find our range of interests boxed in by unspoken political constraints (saying No to families, races, language-groups, territorial limits, identities of every kind), while when we think we are free to discuss politics (what laws should we have? how should we be governed? etc.) we find that all the important decisions have mysteriously been made at an earlier stage without our being aware of them.

    A striking example of this occurs in the chapter on faith, the weakest of the three. The presence of Augustine in this chapter is more indirect, and in explaining why that is so, Mathewes makes some startling concessions: Augustine cannot support a political theology for the present day; his role is confined to ascesis; "belief" is present in politics essentially in the form of disbelief and ironic distance, as the concept of two cities warns us off all concrete political enthusiasms and holds all claims of political institu-tions and traditions up to questioning scrutiny. We might think we could conclude from this that Augustinian thought was open to discuss any and every political proposal. But no! In the course of some courteous discus-sion of views of my own (interpreted in ways that may strike readers, as they strike me, with some surprise) Mathewes summarily repudiates the category of the political "subject" and declares that only "citizenship" can successfully confront the "unredeemed" character of political order (181). (For "unredeemed order" read, quite specifically, "unredeemed institutions." The citizen him- or herself does not seem to suffer from any abiding traces of unredemption! This move takes us to the heart of how Americans appropriated the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, subsuming his self-critical opposition of "moral man" and "immoral society" into a much older and more triumphalist narrative of "moral revolution" and "immoral Establishment.")

    As though in reality we had the choice of being subjects or citizens! The term "subject" commends itself precisely as a descriptive term that draws attention to a persistent and universal (unredeemed, too, if you will!) non-reciprocity in political relations. Not to speak in these or some equivalent terms signals an inability to describe politics as human com-munities practise it, not only in past times and conditions but today in the democratic West. We need only reflect on the fact that in the modern West politics is a profession, pursued by a few who do nothing else, and increas-ingly (in Europe, almost totally) a lifetime's career, absorbing a working life from first youthful maturity to old age. Max Weber, that child of darkness, understood the importance of this very much better than the children of light. How can we even frame thoughts of citizen-engagement without stumbling over the mysterious division running through the body politic between the ruled and their rulers, between those whose affairs the politi-cians decide on and those who make the decisions? How, indeed, can we

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    ever think of political participation without confronting the phenomenon of the politician, that representative public person who, to be the bearer of others' passions and aspirations, is stripped of such high purposes and noble convictions that he or she has formed to live by? The poet . E. Cummings put this last point brutally: "A politician is an arse, on which everything has sat except a man." Too stark, of coursebut too stark an expression o what? If we cannot describe what really happens, we shall never know.

    Far from closing down moral debate with the dead hand of "politi-cal realism," careful political description can frame experience within the theological categories that can make sense of the senseless and enlarge the perspective in which it has appeared as senseless. Being under authority can come to be seen as being in it. Careful description is also the path to understanding how evil takes hold on political life. In speaking of the recovery of politics and exhorting the church to find the imagination it needs, Mathewes is certainly not speaking beside the point, for the refreshment of moral imagination is always a moral theologian's task. But recovery from what disease or disaster? One who knows Augustine knows that politics is a site par excellence of idolatry. But how is idolatry to be dis-covered and disarmed, if not by the patient and detailed unpicking of lies woven into the political vernacular of our times? There is a task beyond exhortation within the durance of time, which is to insert the moral imag-ination into the narrow interstices of actual political possibility, finding the crack in the rock which redemptive faith and hopeful service may slip throughand that requires discernment of what is actually before us. It is not the power of the citizen body to re-found and re-inaugurate that will help us at this point, but the power of Christ to win victory for God's righteousness along the path that leads from Gethsemane to Calvary by way of the praetorium.

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