Political Life under God: Some Questions for Gilbert Meilaender

Gilbert Meilaender is wont to remind me that he was once a very good baseball player. A story about him confirms his opinion and frames this essay.

In the spring of 1974 during my junior year at Princeton, Meilaender invited me to play in his graduate school slow pitch softball intramural league. I could see from the start that my patron was quite skilled. He was an accomplished middle infielder who turned the double play with quickness and authority. Gil was also a fine hitter and smart baserunner. It often happens in slow pitch games that a member of the team at bat will play catcher. And so it was that one late spring afternoon I stood behind the plate when Meilaender led off our squad’s half of the inning. The following conversation took place while I was ‘warming up’ the pitcher and as he prepared to hit.

‘Gil, I’m taking Sheldon Wolin’s course on modern political theory.’

‘He’s an interesting guy.’

‘What do you make of his reading of Luther? He thinks Luther’s separation between the “inner man” and the “outer man” makes Christian ethics politically irrelevant. Political acts affect only the outer or external self. The upshot is quietism.’

‘Well it’s true that for Luther justification by grace through faith reaches to the inner man and we’re not saved by works in any case. But that doesn’t mean Christian ethics is irrelevant to political life.’

As the first pitch was about to be delivered, Gil added: ‘Wolin’s problem is that he’s confusing a soteriology with an ontology’. Then he smacked a line drive double to right center field. I must say that I was (forgive me) doubly impressed. ¹

Thinking with Meilaender about how Christian beliefs concerning human nature and destiny set both possibilities for and limits to our political aspirations and goals, I start with the sense that getting the relation right between ontology (what I call hereafter a doctrine of creation) and soteriology (beliefs about salvation and God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ) is important. We ought not confuse, divide or separate them. In what follows I present an interpretation of how his thought on this relation has worked itself out over the years in connection with politics, and conclude with some questions about that development as it stands, as well as from the standpoint of salient themes in Roman Catholic political ethics.

Fundamental to Meilaender’s work from first to last is his wish to establish within Lutheran theology the conditions for the very possibility of ‘ethics’. He has worried, that is to say, about a one-sided soteriology and doctrine of redemption that simply overwhelms any basis for ethics and moral discrimination present within a theology of creation that considers our human nature, deepest desires, duties, and creaturely destiny. Meilaender’s best statement on this score is in ‘Hearts Set to Obey’, a chapter from his 2006 monograph, The Freedom of a Christian. He argues that the will of God is truly revealed in the commandments of Torah and the structure of creation, and that it is, as Bonhoeffer put it, ‘grace to know God’s commands’. ² Further, the gift of grace in Jesus Christ is not only pardon or forgiveness for sin, but pardon and power. The latter enables Christians, ‘along the way, to grow in the life of discipleship’ and make moral discriminations and judgments about authentically human living. ³ Elsewhere he advances the point.

This is, I suspect, the best that Christian ethics can manage or should try to manage. The one gracious work of God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, will—this side of the eschaton—always have to be described in the languages of both pardon and power. These are different but necessary ways of describing how God’s Spirit draws human lives into the story of Jesus. The language of pardon speaks to Christians’ continuing experience of sin in their lives; the language of power reflects the truth that Christ does, indeed, dwell in believers. Both languages will, therefore, be necessary to say everything that needs to be said about the place of grace in Christian life. ⁴

All of this is critically placed over against a ‘dialectical Lutheranism’ that sees in the disciple’s quest for holiness only sinful striving for self-perfection; that deems righteousness exclusively extrinsic; and that stops far short of ‘ethical reflection’ and even catechesis through exclusive stress on the merciful divine Word that announces forgiveness.

With a ground for ethics in place, how shall we understand political ethics in Christian vision? Over thirty-five years ago, Meilaender addressed the question somewhat indirectly in his theological study of friendship. There he endorses what he calls a ‘liberal polity’ that protects ‘our right to pursue private purposes and goals’. He contrasts it with a political community that is ordered to the ideal of ‘civic friendship’ and its goal of personal and communal moral transformation via the shared ‘other-regarding service of the common good’. ⁵ Such a community historically speaking, that is, in view of the Greek city-state, seems deeply unstable; in any case, the conditions of ‘smallness’ and social intimacy under which such friendship could be realized are very rare. The ideal in fact is incoherent ‘since it conflicts with the necessary good of justice and the impersonality which justice requires’. ⁶ ‘The common good … is the object of no particular person’s intention, not even that of the public persons in their private capacities. It is intended only by public personae’, for justice’s sake, ‘in order to protect against our sinful tendency to exclude our fellows from, rather than include them within, the scope of our affection and concern.’ ⁷

Worst of all, the ideal of civic friendship is ‘essentially pagan, an example of inordinate and idolatrous love’ ⁸ that understands political association to be our highest good and ultimate source of our life and being.

We do not receive our life and being, finally, from the political community. What we receive, or hope to receive, is some measure of justice and the freedom to seek elsewhere what politics cannot provide. A truly personal bond like friendship provides at least an intimation, even if a limited one, of the greater community which God is building; for friendship is a bond of love. Political community, by contrast, is impersonal and—however important for human life—cannot really extend the boundaries of love … In friendship and citizenship we have two different forms of human community which are really not analogous. Friendship involves love, giving and receiving, but is limited in scope. The political bond, though more universal, is an impersonal bond of justice in the world of claim and counterclaim. Encountering a fellow-citizen is not like finding a friend. ⁹

Themes of soteriology and creation establish the boundaries and character of politics. On one side, the greater community which God is building for us and for our salvation sets limits on our political ethics and ideals. To think that we might be humanly completed in and through civic friendship risks an idolatry that is totalitarian; for we do not live in only one city. That ‘a man is a citizen elsewhere’, as Paul Ramsey put it, ‘keeps him from being only a citizen here. By distinguishing the two cities, Christianity corrected the implicit absolutism of loyalty to earthly kingdoms.’ ¹⁰ On the other side, the personal, intimate and private good of friendship as a gift of creation and a form of love will set a limit on what we can conceivably take the political bond to be; whatever its importance for the cause of justice, it is not that kind of good, and not as such an intimation of God’s reign.

In Friendship Meilaender reports that he makes the last suggestion about political friendship and idolatry ‘hesitantly but firmly’. ¹¹ Readers are not directly informed of the reasons for the hesitation; but from the perspective of hindsight provided by his later writings, we can venture a guess. It is that Meilaender believes that the human spirit does properly long for the fullness of self-giving participation in community, and that the eschewal of civic friendship can well appear to leave as our ‘default politics’ a particular kind of ‘liberal polity’ that carries serious problems of its own. He addresses these issues in a 1987 study of ‘Political Community’. ¹²

The essay begins, notably and, in light of the preceding, understandably, with theologically rooted praise for the polity in question.

We too easily forget that, however much liberal individualism may be the product of our modern, industrialized world, it is also the product of Christendom. If there is truth in St. Augustine’s assertion that the human heart is restless until it rests in God, the human person can never belong entirely to any historical community, and human virtue can never be defined sufficiently in terms of good citizenship. ¹³

Thus affirming that his is an ‘Augustinian undertaking’ committed to the idea that ‘good ethics may not be good politics’, ¹⁴ Meilaender goes on to contrast two ‘ideal types’ of the ‘relation between individuals and their political communities’. There is, first, the ‘night-watchman state’, which has ‘no collective purpose’ and that ‘recognizes a plurality of forms of the good and must therefore have difficulty nourishing and sustaining any particular set of virtues’. Left with the lowest common denominator virtues of civility, tolerance, and respect for personal autonomy, we face the danger of ‘what we may picture as a “seepage” problem’; for when our common life acknowledges only that plurality and the ‘need for freedom to pursue our private visions of the good life’, ‘it will be difficult to prevent a belief in the primacy of private interests from seeping down into and dominating our understanding of virtue. Serious moral education, serious training in virtue, may then become difficult to sustain. We may even have difficulty in sustaining the common life of smaller groups upon which we are relying to transmit those “higher” elements of our moral vision.’ ¹⁵

An alternative to the arrangement in which individual freedom is protected for the advancement of our particular views of virtue and the good life is ‘the fraternal community’, ‘in which citizens take care to shape each other’s character, in which the individual feels an emotional solidarity with the community, and in which it is possible to find one’s “true self” by participating in the life of the larger community’. ¹⁶ In the ‘educative state’, true virtue realized in political activity rises above merely private interest and desire and selflessly attains true freedom and, indeed, ‘a kind of salvation’. Meilaender’s response is akin to and develops the earlier criticism of civic friendship; the fraternal ideal is idolatrous, and depends on devotion to a single common goal that promises only an ersatz ‘intimacy’ that easily becomes ideological and coercive. He gives the devil his due, however, in the course of the critique. ‘The key to the educative state, the fraternal community’ is that ‘only the virtuous are free, and the virtuous must first be shaped and disciplined. An important moral insight, true to the needs of our nature. But politically dangerous.’ ¹⁷

Opposing both the educative state and the night-watchman state with its danger of seepage, Meilaender prefers an Augustinian ‘Chalcedonian state’ which neither separates nor confuses the ethical and the political. Such a political community ‘exists to foster private, social bonds—to make space for families, friendships, clubs, faiths, neighborhoods’. What is commended is a pluralist political community that does more than ‘foster private visions of autonomous individuals’, for just doing that will work to corrupt or destroy, through the adulterating seepage of individual choice and consent, the private, personal and social bonds that we as creatures are made for. Those bonds require ‘supporting social structures’. They are not themselves salvation, but they may offer ‘intimations’ of it. ¹⁸ Note again how creation and soteriology, in their relation and distinction, figure in this account, and especially in the explicit attention given to the human creature’s deepest desire for that home in which love is given and received in, with and under God. The promise of salvation speaks to that desire. Political life cannot and must not try to satisfy it; yet political life can and must support and not undermine the sorts of human relations standing in this life as anticipatory fulfillments, comforts and heralds.

Continuing to ‘think with Augustine’ and in particular with Augustine’s The City of God in The Way that Leads There, Meilaender deepens, and perhaps revises, his political ethics. He still insists on a ‘chastened politics’ that ‘is neither redemptive nor salvific’. An important feature of what that means is that ‘we should not suppose that we can be what John Winthrop had in mind: a city set on a hill as an exemplar of divine purpose’. ¹⁹ Political arrangements, moreover, will always be ‘characterized by division and friction’. ²⁰ A chastened politics, however, is not denuded of religious commitments; for these may legitimately contribute to a ‘common wisdom’ that expresses ‘a genuine understanding of the human condition’. ²¹ In our concerns about intergenerational relations, ‘the dignity of the human body, the connection between marriage and procreation, [and] the worth of weak and voiceless human beings’, we cannot and should not be strictly ‘neutral’ with respect to competing, large-scale visions of the good life. Augustine identifies the temporal or earthly peace attainable in politics as a coming together of persons’ wills about the things relevant to mortal life. This combination would be shared by members of both the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena within their political communities. Surely, the argument goes, the concerns just mentioned ‘are relevant to this mortal life and are simultaneously part of our comprehensive visions of the morally good life’. ²²

Meilaender calls for ‘a politics limited and protected by the church’. It is limited in that the church’s mission ‘to offer itself as an alternative community that claims our loyalty’ ‘thwarts the pretensions of political rule’; and politics is protected because the formation of the Christian faithful may also (‘even if unwittingly’) ‘be reshaping and reforming the surrounding society in ways that are more open’ to Christian contributions to its ‘common wisdom’ about ‘what is good and truly human’. ²³ It is in this connection that we discover what may amount to a partial reversal of earlier claims.

The political communities within which we live, though certainly not to be identified with the civitas Dei, are also not the civitas terrena. They exist within the continuing tension between those contrary pulls, the tension that constitutes the story of human history—and might be said to be open to each of them. Marked by that duality, they are places where, sometimes, intimations of the greater peace of the City of God can be dimly seen (even though no way leads from those intimations to that greater peace itself). They are also places where God makes possible a modest sort of peace—setting ambition over against counterambition, force against counterforce. ²⁴

Attending to Augustine’s remark in The City of God that one might discern in Rome’s founding, as a refuge of criminals, a ‘shadowy resemblance’ of the forgiveness of sins, ²⁵ and taking the prime function of political rule to be ‘preserving the world toward the redemption God works in other ways’, ²⁶ Meilaender appears to extend the possibility of ‘intimations’ of the reign of God to political communities themselves.

What sorts of intimations of that ‘greater peace’ are these, or may these be, today? May they now be teased apart from the logic of intimate, personal, ‘private’ relations, and if so, how? Is the political pursuit of justice now no longer ruled out as carrying some ‘shadowy resemblance’ because of its ‘impersonality’? Do we find here not only a diagnosis of liberalism’s perilous ‘seepage down’, but also a hopeful entertaining of a common life ennobled and even blessed by a ‘seepage up’, a ‘percolation’ from the church and other more local communities to our political arrangements and activities themselves? And what is Meilaender’s best present grasp of the distinction and relation between creation, redemption and soteriology as these bear on Christian political ethics?

A further question is the extent to which this Augustinian approach converges with and/or departs from parallel, contemporary Roman Catholic accounts. Meilaender’s body of work prompts interest along these lines since it includes a good amount of trenchant consideration, qualified employment and normative critique of Catholic materials on virtue, divine grace, and sexual and biomedical ethics. ²⁷ On the face of it, Catholic social and political ethics operate with a vocabulary and associated conceptions that he may find decidedly uncongenial. There is, for example, the language of solidarity, which is rather sweepingly defined by St John Paul II as

a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all … [It is] a commitment to the good of one’s neighbor with the readiness, in the gospel sense, to ‘lose oneself’ for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to ‘serve him’ instead of oppressing him for one’s own advantage. ²⁸

Solidarity is explicitly identified as a virtue, exercised—and just so contributing to our human flourishing—by way of social and political participation for the common good. If this point of view looks bad given the drift of some of what we have considered above, then things could look even worse when we add Cathleen Kaveny’s Thomistic defense of the pedagogical function of law. Kaveny argues that in his consideration of human law, Thomas Aquinas

shows how it can lead men and women to virtue in order to promote the common good … His theory is quite capable of accommodating the fact that legal systems are not designed for communities of the morally perfect, or even those with an average moral character. At the same time, however, Aquinas maintains that one of the functions of the positive law is to facilitate the moral growth of those subjected to its strictures. ²⁹

Does a claim like this, even with its qualifications, bring to mind the repressive dangers of Meilaender’s ‘fraternal’ political community? Moreover, Catholic talk about how political discipleship may ‘bring in the reign of God’ has characteristically met with Protestant suspicions about a redemptive politics that ‘smooths over’ salvation history and compromises the sharp distinction between how that reign may be ‘already’ present in promise but ‘not yet’ and for that matter never fully realized short of the eschaton. ³⁰ More generally, Catholics still influenced by a traditional organicist and unitary vision of social life will show an ‘allergy’ ³¹ to the idea of social conflict every bit as strong as the Lutheran allergy to holiness that Meilaender has explored and resisted.

But suppose that our Catholic vocabulary is relevantly qualified and ordered by the grammar of Christian political ethics that Meilaender has laid out. We ought then to say that ours is and can only be a chastened, because ultimately non-redemptive and conflictual, politics. It may be informed, nevertheless, by specifically Christian accounts of what makes human life more fully human, as such accounts are embodied and forged within an inevitably countercultural ecclesial life. Let us proceed to introduce the most recent point about political ‘intimations’ of a ‘greater peace’. Ordered by that grammar, our vocabulary in substance becomes not only viable but provides positive insight. The virtue of solidarity, as an expression of Christian love, would not endorse idolatrous and coercive pretensions to make us all truly virtuous and truly free. An emphasis on political participation will direct us to its empowering and other-regarding possibilities from the variety of our commitments to others in and for society and not just to the state. Participation also can become a measure of justice insofar as it overcomes and protects against the injustice of marginalization or exclusion from social life. ³² Law’s pedagogical purpose does not require the ‘educative state’, and responsibility for our common good is not a matter of seeking a single, all-encompassing common goal. Pope Francis’s injunction to Catholics to form a ‘culture of encounter’ that cares for the poor and rules out exclusion in its many forms also discloses a deeply personal dimension to the struggle for justice; the Gospel, he writes, ‘tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects in our close and continuous interaction’. ³³ These and other categories, perspectives and distinctions involving, for example, state, society, subsidiarity, etc., may contribute to a better understanding of a peaceable political life, and perhaps also of the more permeable boundaries and relations between the public and the private, the impersonal and the personal, justice and love.

My final question, then, emerges from these reflections on Catholic social thought, and presses further the possibility of political intimations of the reign of God. Consider a passage from Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

For after we have obeyed the Lord, and in his Spirit nurtured on earth the values of human dignity, brotherhood, and freedom, and indeed all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise, we will find them again, but burnished and transfigured. This will be so when Christ hands over to the Father a kingdom eternal and universal … On this earth that kingdom is already present in mystery. When the Lord returns, it will be brought into full flower. ³⁴

How far and in what ways would Meilaender concur with this statement? It may appear as one more instance of smoothing over salvation history; and Meilaender’s appeal to temporal ‘peace’ can be said to fall short of the value of, say, ‘brotherhood’. Still, his recent discussions of human and personal ‘dignity’ suggest something of a convergence. The non-comparative concept of ‘personal dignity’ establishes a radical equality among human beings, and the idea is socially relevant whenever we are making ‘on the whole’ judgments about the worth of a human life; however this means to ‘think of ourselves and others in terms of the relation to God’ and ‘as only God can see’ our lives—that is, ‘on the whole’. ³⁵ We encounter our neighbors in such a way, Meilaender affirms,

when ‘they lack essential resources to participate in social communications as such’. Every human being—created by God for covenant with each other and with himself, even in the midst of the many distinctions that mark us—must have the opportunity to live within human society and participate in its common life. Thus, ‘the opportunity to live, and the opportunity to participate in a society, are metaphysically foundational; they correspond to our universal created nature as human beings’. ³⁶

Radical need—even a ‘preferential option for the poor’?—radical equality in dignity, and participation and covenant come together here in a way that strikes a positive connection between God’s good creation, political achievements of peace and justice, and the community God prepares for us in Jesus Christ.

I close with a personal word. In addition to sharing a softball diamond while at school, Gilbert Meilaender and I shared classes and professors. Paul Ramsey was among the latter. He once wrote these perceptive and even memorable words.

The highest tribute one can pay any thinker, or any body of writing, is to wrestle with it; and this may well be the best way to bring out the innermost and most vital meaning of what any man has said … The procedure employed in ‘criticism’ is always an internal one. That is to say that it always seems best to go as far as one can with another man’s thought, developing it up to the point where some criticism or objection or revision unfolds itself, as it were, from within the system or structure of thought under examination. In this way the most constructive results may be expected from criticism; and, in this way also, constructive and critical essays may fairly aim to be explanatory ones. ³⁷

In this article I have tried to do what our teacher commended, to honor Gil and his outstanding contributions to the field of Christian ethics. I do it with gratitude for his fine and faithful wrestling with my own work through our many exchanges over the years. With and beyond that, I wish to thank him for more than four decades of friendship. That, too, has been a blessing, and all the more because it has been such great fun. ³⁸