Augustine as Critic of Liberal Society

In Book 2 of the City of God appears a truly remarkable passage, in which Augustine criticizes Roman society and law in terms that seem as if they were aimed directly at our own modern liberal society.  It is worth quoting in full:

"'So long as it [the republic] survives,' they say, 'so long as it prospers, rich in resources, self-confident in victory, or, better still, secure in peace, what difference does it make to us?  What matters is that there is money to be made to support our lavish style of life, and to give the stronger their hold over the weaker; that the poor treat the wealthy with compliance, to ensure their daily bread--the poor depending on the patronage of the wealthy for a quiet life, the wealthy calling on the poor for support to boost their public standing.  Popularity should accrue not to those whose policies promote public welfare, but to the big providers of public entertainment.  
Law should not be rigorous; low indulgences should not be proscribed.  Rulers should not bother themselves with getting virtuous subjects, simply quiescent ones.  Territories should view their rulers not in the light of moral educators, merely as economic managers and purveyors of satisfactions.  It does not matter if they do not seriously respect them, so long as they treat them with a calculating and subservient fear.  No one should be liable to court proceedings if he has not infringed or done harm to the property, real estate, or physical safety of another person without consent;* but everyone should be free to do with himself, his dependents, and consenting associates exactly what he likes.  Sexual satisfactions should be freely available on the open market for those who want them, especially those who cannot afford to maintain facilities privately.  Domestic architecture should be expensive and ornate, to accomodate large and lavish parties where anyone may game and drink all day and night, if he pleases, till he brings it up or sweats it out.  The sound of dancing should be heard in every neighborhood, and theaters should be humming with excitement at their coarse amusements and their various brash entertainments.  Should someone disapprove of this perfect contentment, he must expect to meet public hostility; and should someone attempt to reform or abolish it, the spirit of popular freedom must know what to do with him: shut him up, pack him up, beat him up!  Religion ought to make a case for itself by guaranteeing and perpetuating these conditions of life for the greatest number of people.  Let the gods have all the worship they want, and all the games that they ant, to enjoy them with (and at the expense of) their worshipers, just so long as they ensure this satisfactory state of affairs against threat from enemy, plague, or disaster.'"

*Joan O'Donovan states that this statement is virtually a textbook definition of the modern theory of law.

Society and the Common Good

Last Friday, I had the wonderful pleasure of classes with the two O’Donovan’s back-to-back, the first discussing Anthony Rosmini’s Society and Its Purposes and the second Augustine’s City of God, and the two texts entered into a fascinating dialogue in my mind.  

Anthony Rosmini was an Italian priest writing in the wake of the French Revolution and trying to synthesize the insights and freedoms of liberal politics with more traditional conservative thinking.  In this text, however, he puts himself into a very interesting bind as he tries to have his cake and eat it too, and in the end, I’m afraid he loses the cake altogether.  The tension we identified concerned what was really the crucial question of the whole text--does society exist to provide space for individuals to seek their own ends or goods (liberal model), or do individuals exist to seek the good of society (traditional conservative and also socialist model)? 

Not, of course, that in the latter model, the two need be opposed; in a traditional Christian view, the good of society is the good of individuals, as we shall see with Augustine.  Rosmini wants to maintain that man is naturally social, and points out at certain points, contra Rousseau, that we are born into societies, and cannot rightly speak of a extra-societal state of nature.  The social good, he wants to maintain, is man’s proper end.  Near the beginning of the text, he states,   

“We do not consider persons as advantageous for ourselves, but as people in whose company we can enjoy the advantages offered by things.  Persons united in this way acquire a communion in good, and together form a single end; things are only a means to the end which all persons have in common.  This is a bond of society....Each of the associated persons by the very nature of society, desires the good of all, because each desires the social end, which is common to all.  I call this desire of each member for the good of the whole body social benevolence.”  

Here we appear to have men united in pursuit of the common good, which is necessarily a social good.
But an ambiguity quickly sets in, an ambiguity appears in the statement “the good of all the members is the end of society.”  Is the good of the members defined as “the end of society” (members oriented toward society) or is the end of society defined as “the good of the members” (society oriented its members)?  If the latter, then society becomes a voluntary (though perhaps indispensable) tool by which fundamentally extra-social individuals pursue their own goods.  And indeed, Rosmini, despite his earlier repudiation of Rousseau, finds himself speaking as if men are not social by birth, but voluntarily enter into society as a means to their advantage.  The good which humans seek is elaborated upon, and is shown to consist in a relationship with God that is fundamentally internal and invisible, and therefore individual.  This is a sharp departure from the Augustinian and Thomist dictum that the summum bonum is finally social, and leaves us wondering how Rosmini is holding onto his notion of a common good as the end of society.  How, after all, can a private, internal, invisible relationship be a common public good?  Presumably all Rosmini can mean by common good is a good that all individuals happen to each seek--in other words, a plethora of individual goods which are common in the sense of being identical, yet separate, as if he were to say, “All men share a common meal in the evening” meaning that all men eat a similar meal at a similar time.  Finally, 86 pages in, he tips his hand, and says the following:

“The remote [that is, final] end [of society], which consists in contentment of spirit, always relates to the individual and clearly has its seat in each individual composing society.  This follows from what has been said, namely, that individuals are necessarily the end of society and that societies are and can only be methods, systems, means which tend to increase individual happiness.  The remote end is also seen as something invisible, remaining within the spirit of the person enjoying it.  It is entirely subjective.”

St. Thomas rolled over in his grave when those lines were penned.  Although it is conditioned by the Christian insistence that good is only found finally in God, the substance of the liberal idea triumphs--society exists simply to facilitate individual happiness; society is only a tool to a higher, unsocial end.  


Enter Augustine, declaring that “Yes, the life of the city is undeniably a social life!” (XIX.16)  The common good of the City of God is truly common, and is enjoyed in common.  How else could it be, since “A man’s possession of goodness is in no way diminished by the arrival, or the continuance, of a sharer in it; indeed, goodness is a possession enjoyed more widely by the united affection of partners in that possession in proportion to the harmony that exists among them.  In fact, anyone who refuses to enjoy this possession in partnership will not enjoy it at all; and he will find that he possesses it in ampler measure in proportion to his ability to love his partner in it.” (XV. 5)

Indeed, for Augustine, the contrast between the City of Man and the City of God consists precisely in this--that the city of God is a true commonwealth, united around the pursuit of the truly social, common good of enjoyment of God, whereas the City of Man is simply an association to aid men in the pursuit of private goods.  Therefore, the City of God is able to exist in peace and harmony, united around a common object of love, whereas the City of Man inevitably falls into dissension as each pursues his own desires.  The great vices of the City of Man are individualist--the libido dominandi and the greed for possessions, but the problem is not that the private goods they are seeking happen to be vicious, but that the pursuit of private good is inherently a vice, as he shows clearly at the outset of his account of the two cities, explaining the fall of the angels:

“The contrasted aims of the good and the evil angels did not arise from any difference in nature or origin.  It would be utterly wrong to have any doubt about that, since God created both, and he is good in his creation and fashioning of all substances.  We must believe that the difference had its origin in their wills and desires, the one sort persisting resolutely in that Good which is common to all--which for them is God himself--and in his eternity, truth, and love, while the others were delighted rather with their own power, as though they  themselves were their own Good.  Thus they have fallen away from that Supreme Good which is common to all, which brings felicity, and they have devoted themselves to their own ends....The true cause therefore of the bliss of the good angels is their adherence to him who supremely is.  When we ask the cause of the evil angels’ misery, we find that it is the just result of their turning away from him who supremely is, and their turning towards themselves, who do not exist in that supreme degree.  What other name is there for this fault than pride?” (XII.1, 6)

And this, of course, is why, as I’ve said recently, it’s not a coincidence that liberalism and libertarianism sound so similar--libertarianism argues, contrary to the great Christian tradition, that the goods man seeks are fundamentally private and individual, and society exists only insofar as necessary to safeguard each’s pursuit of his individual desires.  Truly, what other name is there for this fault than pride?

A Letter to St. Paul's Cathedral

I'll be mailing this tomorrow.  [edit: I initially addressed this to the Dean, but it appears now that the Canon Chancellor is the appropriate person.]

To the Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser,

I am writing to you to express my deep concern and disappointment over a sermon preached a couple weeks ago, on the Sunday of the Conversion of St. Paul during Evensong at St. Paul’s Cathedral.  The sermon in question was preached by the Revd. Mark Oakley of Grosvenor Chapel, Mayfair, and was, quite frankly, the worst sermon I have ever heard in an Anglican Church.  As a new Anglican Christian, I was embarrassed for my adopted Church, having brought to the service two non-Anglican friends who were touring in London.

Now, of course, let’s be honest--one doesn’t expect much of the sermon these days when visiting services at cathedrals and the like.  A watery ten-minute homily offering some vague remarks on the reading for the day and some general words of encouragement or exhortation is, perhaps, par for the course in this day and age. 

One scarcely expects to find a vigorous commitment to Christian orthodoxy or a rigorous attention to the text of Scripture, I am well aware.  So I assure you that I would not be troubling you with this letter if the sermon in question were not exceptionally bad.  I am also sure that you consider it no part of your office to act as a sort of “thought police” for all the clergy preaching in the cathedral, and that ministers are allowed a great deal of leeway in forming and propounding their convictions.  However, in a cathedral of such renown and visibility, and on a day of such importance, honoring the conversion of the cathedral’s namesake, it seems that it would be in the best interest of parishioners and visitors to exercise some quality control, rather than allowing the name of the blessed Saint Paul to be publicly dishonored and insulted.

In the sermon, the Revd. began by telling us that the Bible was like a friend, a conversation partner with whom one could have mutually challenging discussions, and ultimately have to disagree from time to time.  In light of what followed, I must say that Rev. Oakley does not know how to be a very good friend.  He proceeded to spend some time walking through recent scholarly debates on the authenticity of the Pauline epistles.  These epistles could be divided into three categories, he informed us: those which scholars generally agreed had been written by Paul (Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon), those which scholars generally agreed had not been written by Paul (1&2 Timothy and Titus), and those which were a matter of ongoing dispute (Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians).  True enough so far as a statement of current scholarly opinion (at least among certain sectors of the scholarly community), though an odd way to start out a sermon.  Without offering anything in the way of a defense of these hypotheses (as would indeed have been odd outside of an academic context), he proceeded for the rest of the sermon to take them as given facts, and to repeatedly imply a subtle derision of any soul so benighted as to persist in thinking of all thirteen epistles as authentically Pauline.

Now, he hastened to assure his hearers that the authors of the later, inauthentic epistles meant no harm or disrespect, but were following a venerable ancient literary convention.  But, having mounted this brief defense of the “pseudo-Pauline” epistles, and perhaps justification for their inclusion in the canon, his sermon took quite a different turn.  St. Paul, he said, was a frightening, challenging, and radical thinker, and if we wanted to do justice to him, we ought not to tame that radicalness, but should seek to come to grips with it and let ourselves be challenged by it.  The New Testament itself, he said, had tried to tame Paul, to revise and water down his legacy, and we can see this happening in the disputed epistles and the inauthentic epistles.  The case of slavery, he said, provides an excellent example.  Initially, Paul preached that “there is no slave or free” in Christ--and that all slaves ought to be freed by their masters (he cited Philemon for this); later, in the disputed letters, we find a much less radical, more institutionalized Paul, saying that slaves should obey their masters as they would the Lord, and finally, in the inauthentic letters, he informed us, we find statements as harsh as “be submissive to your masters,” totally overturning the original radical message of Paul.  Other examples, we were assured, could be multiplied, for example on gender issues.  Finally, the Revd. closed with some flighty rhetorical effusions about the kinds of Christianity that Paul would want nothing to do with (“heavy books and strict ethics”), and the kind of open, egalitarian, “radical” Christianity that he would want to see.  We must embrace the latter and eschew the wicked attempts of the inauthentic letters and of later Christians to water Paul down.  

Now, before jumping into my manifold concerns about this sermon, I should be frank about where I’m coming from.  As a fairly experienced student of theology, though no expert in New Testament studies, I am unconvinced by the standard arguments against Pauline authorship for many of the letters that are attributed to him.  It may indeed be that some of them are not Pauline, but hundreds of scholars all agreeing to repeat the same thin and patchy arguments does not prove them so.  I am also committed to a firm belief in the authority of Scripture--there are doubtless an acceptable range of ways in which to articulate this authority, but abandoning even the pretense of believing it is not one of them.  

While my particular perspective may have heightened my concerns, though, I don’t think you have to share my perspective to be troubled, confused, and upset by Rev. Oakley’s sermon.   

First, there were some practical problems about the approach of the sermon.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would propose, as the definition of a sermon: “edifying reflection on the text of Holy Scripture (with other auxiliary sources) as a guide for the life and practice of the hearers.”  This precludes, among other things, essentially academic dicussions of essentially academic problems.  To be sure, it is helpful to draw on academic scholarship to elucidate a text under discussion, but Rev. Oakley’s “sermon” scarcely got so far as actually considering a Biblical text--it had more the character of an academic discussion of what qualified as a Biblical text.  This style of reflection, while possibly edifying in a classroom, scarcely belongs in worship.  Moreover, if the purpose of a sermon is to bring the insight of Scripture to bear on the lives of the listeners, how does it help them to instead use it to pit different sections of Scripture against one another?  To be sure, there are variations and tensions within various portions of Scripture, which the teacher may need to take note and analyze; but if the express purpose of the “sermon” is to turn two (or three) whole chunks of the Bible against each other and watch them have at it, like some crude textual gladiatorial match, this serves only to confuse, and not to edify, the listeners.

Second, there was the theological problem: even supposing that certain letters originally accepted as Pauline are not in fact Pauline, they are still part of the canon, which has been received by the Church as a guide for faith and practice; they are still presumably of great value in guiding our lives.  Since when did non-Pauline mean non-canonical?  And yet Rev. Oakley’s purpose was not to discern different authorial emphases that each had their own valuable perspectives, but to persuade his hearers to disregard a large chunk of the New Testament, to throw it out the window as rubbish. 

Third, there were exegetical problems, which is perhaps an understatement.  In discussing the “taming” of Paul’s view on slavery, he contrasted the early testimony of Galatians and Philemon, for example, that there should be no slavery, with the later testimony of Ephesians and Timothy that slaves should continue to obey their masters.  This is, if you will pardon my saying so, just absurd.  The testimony regarding slavery in all the traditional Pauline epistles is actually remarkably consistent.  In 1 Corinthians, for example, a letter that Oakley accepted as genuinely Pauline, Paul says “But as God has distributed to each one, as the Lord has called each one, so let him walk....Let each one remain in the same calling in which he was called.  Were you called while a slave? Do not be concerned about it; but if you can be made free, rather use it.  For he who is called in the Lord while a slave is the Lord’s freedman. Likewise he who is called while free is Christ’s slave” (7:17, 20-22).  In other words, ultimately there should be no slavery, and there is no real difference between slave and master in Christ, but for the sake of pursuing peace and humility, slaves should continue to serve faithfully in their condition if necessary.  A more subtle approach to doing away with the institution is recommended.  Repeatedly the testimony is the same, in Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Timothy, Philemon: masters could continue to have slaves in terms of legal title, but in terms of conduct, they were to make it as if the slaves were brothers, and so undermine the institution.  The slaves were likewise supposed to undermine the institution by serving their masters as a way of imitating Christ, not because they were legally required to.  The letter to Philemon seems to fit this picture precisely, rather than calling for straightforward legal abolition of slavery.  Oakley also claimed that the original radical Paul was not interested in strict ethical norms like the later false Paul, but I can’t think where this radical Paul then exists--certainly not in Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, or 1 Thessalonians, which all contain their fair share of strict moral condemnation and exhortation.

Finally, there were enormous logical problems with the sermon, perhaps all the more censurable because Rev. Oakley set out to offer such an academic presentation of his subject.  For one thing, he began by claiming to simply be following the scholarly consensus--seven genuine letters, three disputed letters, and three inauthentic letters--but quickly shifted, when contrasting the “radical” Paul with the “tame” Paul, to treating the disputed letters as every bit as non-Pauline as the inauthentic letters.  This left his listeners in a very confused state, no doubt.  Apparently he was trying to smuggle in his own views of the authenticity of the letters (six inauthentic ones) under the guise of simply stating the scholarly consensus (three inauthentic ones), but if that were so, one would hope that he could offer some proof for these views!  The only proof offered (although it was not offered as such, since Rev. Oakley appeared to have accepted the inauthenticity of the six letters as a given) was the non-exegesis just mentioned and the criterion of radicalness: only those letters which give us a radical Paul are the genuine Paul.  But of course, this criterion is utterly circular: on the one hand, we say that the “real” Paul is radical because we find radicalism in his letters; on the other hand, we decide which letters are his by determining how radical they are!  Finally, I couldn’t help but finding it ironic that Oakley’s final point was this: we need a radical, revolutionary, countercultural Paul, not one that we fit within an institutional strait-jacket or tone down to fit our norms and preferences.  Of course, this countercultural, norm-defying Paul that Rev. Oakley wanted was one who fit our current cultural values like a glove--no ethical rules, the demise of institutions, the equality and legitimacy of different perspectives and sexual preferences, etc.  If we want a “radical, revolutionary” Paul, we’d better be willing to have one who strikes deep at some of postmodernity’s cherished values.  

I’m sorry that this letter has grown overlong (though still much shorter than most of Paul’s letters, I’ll warrant).  My point has not been to indulge myself in the joy of picking apart Rev. Oakley’s sermon, as a rhetorical or academic exercise.  Rather, my concern has been for those weary souls who come to your cathedral, hoping to join with others in praising God, remembering the great St. Paul, and receiving spiritual refreshment, but who find that when they come asking for bread, they are given a stone.  

Respectfully yours in Christ,

Brad Littlejohn

Review of Life at the Bottom (by Theodore Dalrymple)

So the Romans 13 paper has been growing faster than the federal deficit, and now stands at 80 pages...I was planning to put up bits and arguments here on the blog as I wrote it, but it wrote itself too fast for that. I'll have to come back and put up some pieces later, I suppose. Meanwhile, I need to finish getting all of my book reviews from Wilson's class up--there's still three to go. Here's one on a book I actually really enjoyed--Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom.

Theodore Dalrymple’s account of life within the underclass of the British welfare state is a scathing and sobering account the evils that we in the West have wrought in the name of justice and mercy. It offers a damning indictment of the agendas that have sought to pursue these Biblical values, but with God conveniently left out, and shows just how far they have veered off track, and thus also indicts the Church for its failure to take firm charge of the God-given mandate for the poor. This book ought to convince any honest reader that something is deeply and fundamentally flawed about the way we have sought to minister to the lower strata of society in the modern West.

Unfortunately, though, when it comes to raising and addressing the deeper questions provoked by his analysis, Dalrymple falls silent. This is not necessarily a complaint against his book—every book must have a limited scope—but merely an observation that the book leaves most of the important work to still be done by the reader. And indeed, if this book is to have any relevance for a Christian political theory, we must be able to draw more from it than merely a specific description of the specific ills arising from a specific set of policies that are historically unique.
For example, Dalrymple’s discussion of the problem of the liberal welfare agenda consistently critiques their presupposition that suffering and bad behavior are the result of social causation rather than individual choice. This presupposition means that they never challenge erring individuals to grow up and change their ways, and so they condemn them to a perpetuation of their degradation. But, of course, inherent in this critique is a sharing of the presupposition, for Dalrymple’s entire point seems to be to call his society to account for helping to induce and prolong the terrible moral, educational, and economic deprivations of this underclass. He consistently aims to show that absurd social policies have helped wreck so many lives. Therefore, his real argument cannot be against the idea that deprivation and degradation are due to bad social factors, but rather to suggest that the liberal agenda has substituted particularly harmful social factors for relatively benign ones. Of course, Dalrymple also wants to maintain the case that social causation cannot erase individual responsibility, but his critique of the appeal to social causation would be clearer if he recognized explicitly that he shared some basic presuppositions of it.
There are a few things we should be careful not to draw from Dalrymple’s book, which many conservatives might be tempted to. First, this description of the unique conditions affecting the underclass in the Western welfare state is not a description of the worldview of underclasses generally. Dalrymple is clear about this, remarking about the difference between the “poor” in England and in Africa. We should not be tempted to think, based on our rather bizarre experience with the “poor” in America and Europe, that poor people in general are lazy and irresponsible—we have helped to make them so here, but this is far from generally true (though of course there are always examples), and is not universally true even here. Thus, it is a rather serious failure of perspective when conservatives see the call for justice to the poor in the Third World as simply another manifestation of the same phenomenon that drives the welfare state, and as likely to yield the same result. To raise concern over the rights of oppressed workers in Guatemala or over the exploitation of the poor in Mozambique is not necessarily an example of a “leftist” agenda, and it is a mark of how blinding the partisan agendas are that people often think that way. The difference, of course, is that very many workers really are oppressed in Guatemala, and the poor really are systematically exploited in Mozambique. In Britain, it may be true that prosperity and civil justice have so increased that the only people who are “trapped in poverty” are there because they don’t care and don’t try not to be. But we should not use that observation to deny that in very many places, people really are trapped in poverty and exploited, and it is our duty to campaign against this injustice.
Indeed, it is important to note that Dalrymple’s book does not really provide an argument against the essential liberal complaint that the poor are being exploited for the economic benefit of the middle class; rather, it simply points out that liberals are complicit in this. In my mind, this is a point he should make more of: why does the vast apparatus of welfare and social rehabilitation bureaucracy stay in place, and even grow, when its flaws are so clear? Because millions of people have an economic interest in keeping it there—millions of people are employed in that bureaucracy, whether it be the public school teachers, the welfare office workers, the homeless shelter personnel, or the army of administrators and lobbyists who keep it all going. To some extent, it seems that Britain’s problem has been a shift from industrial exploitation of the underclass to bureaucratic exploitation, for all the conscience-soothing that liberal platitudes might offer.
Dalrymple’s book should also not be taken as an argument for social independency. Liberals err by denying that the poor are independent agents; rather, they are a product of society and must remain dependent on society. Thus a culture of dependency is created, and no one is encouraged to take care of themselves. The solution to this, the capitalist would argue, is to get government out of it, to start requiring people to be independent agents, taking care of themselves, rather than being passive dependents on a welfare society. Participation in the benefits of society, the capitalist argues, should be based on individual merit; that is, each individual is free to try to provide for himself and better himself, and those who are best qualified will rise to the top. While this is a popular answer to the problem of dependency, it is far from a Christian answer. The Church should insist, not on dependency or independency, but on interdependency—that is, understanding that each of us, as members of society, is dependent on everyone else. No one should be asked or expected to govern themselves and provide for themselves all alone, but neither should anyone expect to be totally governed and provided for by another. It must always be a reciprocal relationship; everyone should be offered gifts, but only if they are willing to bring their own gifts to the table to share as well. And this observation points to the real moral of Dalrymple’s book: the failure of liberalism has not been to take too much responsibility for the needy, but to take too little responsibility. Taking responsibility for the suffering and sinful neighbor does not mean forking over some money to a faceless bureaucracy, which will then dole out benefits down an impersonal chain of command. In such a system, nobody is really responsible for the needy; if anything goes wrong, the buck can always be passed to someone else or to society in general, as Dalrymple clearly depicts. Taking true responsibility for the needy means being willing to get out there ourselves and do the dirty work of helping, providing, and discipling. And here the conservative hypocrisy is unmasked—we want to blame the liberals for their irresponsibility, and the needy for their irresponsibility, instead of starting (or even ending, for that matter) with taking true responsibility ourselves.