Christianity and the res publica
One of our parish’s distinguished clergy associates, the Rev’d. Fr. Clarence Butler Ph.D., recently remarked upon the parallels he sees between our current era and its view of the past, with the tensions that existed between Enlightenment thinkers and their view of the Middle Ages. We can all look forward to the talk he plans to give upon this very interesting topic later in the year, but it calls to mind two related comments.
One was made by the Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan, who wrote that “the Western world is living through its own past and the pasts of many forgotten cultures.”1 The other was by the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who observed that: “People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void, of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke or insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”2 Each of these comments is timely in the face of the deep tensions that so much engage us now concerning the inherited religious and cultural patterns (including especially those of Christianity) which continue to shape our ostensibly ever more secular societies.
In searching for how best to respond to the secular tide confronting us, there is a danger that we might appear to reduce Christianity to a sectarian project that might be able to offer a rhetorically powerful but theologically and culturally inadequate response to the direction of contemporary and aggressively liberal societies – in which powerful elites seem in fact to be advancing an ever more totalitarian liberalism that brooks no dissent.
At such times, we do well to remember that we are not the first generation to face such challenges. Augustine opens the City of God by speaking of “the city of this world, a city which aims at domination, which holds nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination” (I.1).
Nonetheless, as one commentator has pointed out, St. Augustine was “marked by a deep sensitivity to the fragility and incompleteness of the political order and the dangers which beset it. Augustine’s thought on the possibilities of politics, however, is considerably more complex than a stance of unrelieved pessimism.” After all, in Book 19 of the City of God about the nature of a republic, the res publica, the commonwealth, the common good, Augustine asks about the conditions that must be present for there to be a res publica at all. He then used Cicero’s definition to show that it is not “any and every association of the population” that can be called a res publica, but only “an association united by a common sense of right and a community of interest.” As we might now say, unless there be a partnership for the common good there can be no commonwealth.3
It is fashionable to privilege justice as especially central in all this currently (only perhaps when it is held to be displaced by the demands of equality), yet Augustine’s core point remains compelling, for no earthly polity will ever perfectly embody justice; ultimate fulfillment and happiness are therefore, as Christians have always understood, to be found only in the heavenly Jerusalem, the eschatological City of God handed over to the Father.
Yet the implications here do not only point one way, for the City of God is not a visible institutional polity, and still less a specific ecclesial or civil structure. It is an eschatological, apocalyptic symbol for the final community of the saints. Civil society cannot be straightforwardly identified therefore either with the City of God or with the city of the devil.
This entails that elements of the kingdom (such as genuine concern for justice and the good of all) are mixed, in every social order, with self‑love and the lust for domination.
This theological “eschatologising” of the City of God “desacralizes” politics. The state is relative and restricted; its sphere is in some sense autonomous. The late Roman Pope Benedict, following Augustine, thus insisted that Christian political engagement should be grounded in rational ethics rather than in an imagined political “theology of the kingdom.”
And here it is important to see that Augustine does not deny political reality to all non‑Christian societies, for they can be “republics of a certain kind,” that fall short of the Kingdom yet still count as “cities.” Augustine’s pragmatic definition of a people as “an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love” allows many gradations. Different societies are better or worse depending on what they love – from trivial goods (celebrity culture, football, Facebook, binge‑drinking) to higher goods (theological study, genuine neighbour‑love).
This has much significance, as such an approach can yield a “pluralistic‑analogical” understanding of the common good. Politics can partially embody the full human good without ever exhausting it; and within all this, multiple goods must be held together without any one being made absolute. This can in turn support a pluralistic politics that, in principle, can respect the insights of all those traditions able to articulate their claims, in a rational ethic as also the many institutions and values characteristic of the authentic liberal tradition. But this possibility requires that this liberal tradition does not seek to make itself absolute since, at that point, it is no longer liberal and shuts down the very possibility of authentic political pluralism and debate. Something that we see all too plainly in the pitiless and self-righteous puritanism of the woke.
Charles Taylor offers a more irenic and historically careful approach, and suggests that wise Christian engagement with modernity should follow the model of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s mission in China (from 1582-1610). That proceeded by looking for points of contact and for shared moral intuitions within what was clearly an otherwise “alien” culture, an approach which did not see it simply as enemy territory.
Moreover, Charles Taylor warns against assuming that whatever is in continuity with our inherited Christendom of the past must automatically be “legitimate Christian culture,” and then the conclusion that novel secular forms are therefore incompatible by definition. That mindset would freeze Christianity into its earlier cultural embodiment and experiences, one that would view any and all later development as a threat. Taylor instead suggests that our present situation is better described as “post‑Christendom” than “post‑Christian.” Elements of the gospel have diffused beyond overtly Christian institutions and now co‑exist with powerful counter‑currents.
It could then further be argued, for those wanting a touch of radicalism, that modern liberal political culture’s unconditional affirmation of universal human rights – to life, freedom, citizenship, self‑realization, irrespective of gender, culture, civilisation level or religious adherence – could not fully emerge within the structures of the original Christendom (and thus be taken to offer an element of critique). So it might be suggested that some of liberalism’s moral insights should be recognized as authentic developments of the gospel that required a break with certain legacy structures (as we might argue the Reformation illustrated). Such a perspective would allow an openness to modernity insofar as it can be recognized thus to contain both genuine incarnational developments as well as closures to what God wills, which is to say the ultimate good of all people. In other words, a discerning Christian response must distinguish these strands, not simply reject modernity any more than modernity can be allowed consistently to foreclose against even the possibility of hearing the perspective of Christianity and its moral voce.
[1]E. McLuhan and F. Zingrone (eds.) Essential McLuhan, Routledge, 1995, p. 298.
[2]The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) Part I: Lost Letters, p. 22
[3] See The City of God 19.23 and D. Hollenbach, “The Common Good Revisited,” Theological Studies 50, pp. 70–94, p. 79.).