Abstract
For readers interested in Augustine’s political thought but discouraged by a daunting secondary literature, Michael Bruno’s Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought is without doubt the place to begin. An overview of the major twentieth-century interpretations of Augustinian political thought, Bruno’s book is both clear and engaging. It introduces the reader to many of the key figures in the debate, managing to situate each of them in their historical context without over-historicizing their ideas. This is fitting, given that Bruno’s overarching goal is to use the literature to establish a hermeneutical theory for authentic Augustinian interpretation. In reviewing the debate about Augustine’s political thought, Bruno succeeds in bringing his readers into what feels like a real conversation, skillfully weaving quotes from the various interlocutors into his own treatment of each figure. In sum, Bruno has not only done an impressive job of synthesizing a large amount of information into a manageable read, he has done so in a way that is dynamic and thought-provoking.
Beginning in France, Bruno tells the tale of scholars such as Combés, Gilson, Arquillère and Marrou working in post-World War I Europe. He sets up his narrative well, signaling the ways in which each of these authors will influence the debate in the Anglo-American context. He then turns to the likes of Niebuhr and Deane, associating their realism with post-World War II concerns, while contrasting their approach with those of Paul Ramsey and Ernest Fortin. Next, Bruno turns to what he calls the secularist interpretations of Augustine’s political thought and their opponents, focusing on the seminal work of Robert Markus and the works that react against it. This, of course, comprises the rest of the debate, and, while he addresses many more authors, it is clear that its key figures are Milbank, Dodaro and Kaufman.
Beyond being an extremely useful guide for scholars and students coming to this debate for the first time, Political Augustinianism is also a must-read for those already working on Augustine’s political thought and indeed anyone interested in how to interpret a classical text. As Bruno explains, his treatment of the twentieth-century debate is not simply expository, but analytical, seeking to ‘examine the hermeneutical and contextual questions that undergird’ the interpretations he treats (p. 9). While Bruno officially devotes only the last chapter to hermeneutical questions, his entire book can be read as an implicit commentary on method. In his own words, his goal is to establish that ‘the socio-political lens in which Augustine’s work has been viewed after Arquillère’ is problematic because it isolates ‘certain elements of Augustine’s corpus to characterize his thought’ (p. 307). Having done this, Bruno uses the various emphases of recent scholars to work out how to approach political thought holistically.
By calling for an ‘integral understanding’ of Augustine’s thought, Bruno resists any effort to plumb Augustine’s writings and call it Augustinian (p. 307). Any truly authoritative interpretation, he writes, must include an ‘acknowledgment of Augustine’s theological context, the utilization of certain primary sources, and preservation of his vision of two cities’ (p. 270). While this might not be a claim with which all his readers agree—and doubtless it is not one with which all his subjects agree—it is certainly one that must be taken seriously.
This is especially true for those working in fields other than theology; Bruno’s account, after all, is written from the perspective of a theologian. Bruno, in fact, points this out, arguing that because Augustine was a Catholic bishop, there is a real sense in which the theological perspective must be privileged, even when it comes to interpreting his political thought. If Bruno is right, he highlights an interesting difficulty facing those outside historical theology: can one understand his political thought without also understanding his Christology and ecclesiology? If not, how will one know whether one’s interpretation is ‘authentically’ Augustinian? These are difficult questions that merit consideration.
At the same time, one might ask, is it realistic to expect non-experts to become experts in Augustine’s theology, especially when the debates over Augustine’s Christology and ecclesiology fill books of their own? While Bruno does not back down from claiming that any authentic interpretation of Augustine must recognize him as a theological thinker, he does acknowledge that some interpretations rightly ‘limit their scope or focus on one aspect of Augustine’s thought’ (p. 267). How far this caveat goes is left as a question for the reader to explore. The most significant claim with which Bruno’s reader must grapple is this: any reading of Augustine’s politics is contingent on its author’s views about his theology—and the choice to abstract from his theology is itself a view about his theology.
Further, approaching Bruno’s treatment of the twentieth-century debate as a political theorist, I appreciated and learned from the choices he made about which authors to include and what questions to highlight. And yet, I was also left wondering why some of the figures included were considered political while others, whom political theorists often read and whose questions we take seriously, were not. For example, even within Anglo-American scholarship, the charge of Arendt, first uttered by Machiavelli, that Christians are too ‘otherworldly’ to be good citizens, looms large over many political readings of Augustine. As such, I wished that this aspect of the debate had been explored more fully, especially since Williams’s ‘Politics and the Soul’ essay, so inspirational to both Dodaro and the Radical Orthodoxy movement, directly responds to Arendt’s critique. This, moreover, would have enriched the provocative but brief analysis of the hermeneutic of refutation in the last chapter, as well as the discussion of Christian citizenship that ends the book. Perhaps this is material for a second volume.
In sum, Bruno’s book serves as both a helpful introductory guide to Augustinian scholarship and a springboard for thinking about hermeneutical questions facing any scholar who seeks to appropriate a theological thinker. It also explores important questions about the nature of politics, and traces out how the prominent political questions have changed over time. By showing how Augustine scholars have moved from a concern with the heritage of political Augustinianism and the spheres of Church and State to a focus on Christian citizenship, Bruno leaves us with an important question. Why are we interested in the Christian citizen now and is this at all connected to the recent emphasis on an integral retrieval of Augustine’s political thought?