[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
oliver.odonovan@ed.ac.uk
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
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF
Review 617
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 citi-
zenship." 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 penetrat-
ing 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 schol-
arship 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 inten-
tional. 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. Democ-
racy 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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618 Political Theology
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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620 Political Theology
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.
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011
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