Challenges in the Appropriation of Augustine

The publication of James Smith’s Awaiting the King seals his reputation as the most effective popularizer of Augustine in the academy. This text displays all the features that have made the earlier Cultural Liturgies volumes so appealing: substantive scholarly engagement, drawing on both Augustine studies and contemporary theology; illuminating analyses of literature, film, and other cultural resources, illustrating the payoff of his proposals; and a warm, accessible style that invites readers to study and engage the world around them as an exercise in Christian formation and an expression of Christian faithfulness.

Yet this volume also marks a new stage in Smith’s intellectual journey. Smith recounts how he was raised in the Kuyperian tradition, but later embraced the critiques of the state promulgated by Stanley Hauerwas and others (pp. xi–xiii). Here, he returns to his Reformed roots for a kind of via media shaped most decisively by Oliver O’Donovan. I suspect Smith’s very narrative will resonate with many readers who have embraced a Hauerwasian interest in story, virtues, and countercultural witness, but have continued to wonder whether more is required for Christian faithfulness in the world than for the church simply to be the church. To speak personally, as a product of both the Kuyperian tradition and Duke, I found Smith’s narrative quite similar to my own.

Smith’s book is an especially timely contribution in a cultural moment when white evangelical support for Donald Trump has raised serious questions about the meaning of the term, ‘evangelical’, and whether Christian engagement in the public sphere means anything beyond partisan hypocrisy. Christian political discernment is a rare and sorely needed skill. Augustine is one of the most fertile sources in the Christian tradition for such reflection, and Awaiting the King is the best book-length presentation of his political thought for non-specialists. This makes Smith’s work not only intelligent but important.

In the interest of space, I will avoid summarizing the book and jump straight to my questions and criticisms, focusing on two concerns. First, is the hero of this volume Augustine or Oliver O’Donovan? And second, has Smith satisfactorily addressed Willie Jennings’s challenge to the Cultural Liturgies project?

Augustine or O’Donovan?

Though Smith frames his book as an appropriation of Augustine’s political thought, he unabashedly identifies Oliver O’Donovan as the basis for his proposals and dedicates major sections to summarizing O’Donovan’s works. This is itself a service, even for scholarly readers, given the importance of O’Donovan’s contributions and the notorious opacity of his prose. O’Donovan furnishes Smith with a series of core convictions: Christ’s present rule in the world, the church’s political character, and the provisional and passing status of earthly authorities. Smith also follows suit on what is perhaps O’Donovan’s most defining proposal: a qualified Christendom, whereby the church calls the state to account and directs political society toward the character of God’s kingdom.

O’Donovan is, of course, a sensible choice for a contemporary Augustinian resource, given his impact on both historical Augustine studies and constructive political theology. But O’Donovan’s theological proposals do not just reiterate Augustine’s thought; they appropriate it for a liberal Western context quite different from Augustine’s own. And some of O’Donovan’s liberal interests shape his reading of Augustine in ways that Smith and I seem to agree are mistaken.

The first chapter of Awaiting the King treats the most cited passages in Augustine’s corpus in defense of a liberal conception of political society (pp. 48–52). In City of God 19.21, Augustine analyzes Cicero’s definition of res publica as a community founded on justice and concludes that Rome would not qualify as a republic on these terms. In 19.24, Augustine introduces a new definition of res publica as a community founded on common objects of love, and affirms Rome’s status as a republic on this more realistic conception. According to a venerable line of interpreters, these passages demonstrate Augustine’s affirmation of political communities oriented around temporal but not eternal peace, thus legitimating Christian cooperation with non-Christians on matters necessary for this mortal life. So significant is this passage for O’Donovan that it furnished the title of his Stob lectures, delivered at Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary and published under the title, Common Objects of Love, ¹ as well as the focus of two major articles on Augustine’s political vision. ² (The second is a substantially revised version of the first that presents the same perspective.)

As I have argued, this reading is misguided. ³ City of God 19.24 does not support a liberal political vision; it recasts res publica according to love instead of justice—a most Augustinian impulse—only to reinforce Augustine’s critique of the Roman empire on the grounds that it loves the wrong things. Smith shares this reading and repudiates the liberal alternative. As he writes, rightly I think, the critical point of this passage is Augustine’s interest in desire. What distinguishes the heavenly and earthly cities is their objects of worship, the antithetical teloi to which they aim. Yet the rest of Smith’s book proceeds as if this departure from O’Donovan’s interpretation does not matter. Subsequent chapters repeat O’Donovan’s understanding of political authority as a reflection of divine authority, democratic liberalism as a crater of the gospel, and Christendom as a call for earthly rulers to submit to Christ through the renunciation of totalistic pretensions.

But if O’Donovan’s reading of City of God is mistaken, serious implications potentially follow, and they cut two ways. On the one hand, political authority may not reflect the divine will after all, or at least not so directly. As Robert Markus has argued, Augustine does not locate political authority in creation but in the fall. ⁴ Political authority became a necessity for restraining sin and ordering society only after humans proved incapable of relating harmoniously with each other. It is thus a lamentable but necessary response to our fallen condition, more akin to slavery than to family. Yet this reading invites a more Yoderian interpretation of political authority than Smith seems to want. Is the state God’s instrument for good, as O’Donovan suggests? Or is it one of the powers and principalities, a reality we are called to resist even as we cannot help but depend upon it?

On the other hand, O’Donovan’s vision of political authority stops short of where Augustine ultimately pushes it, namely, to a defense of religious coercion. The importance of this uncomfortable reality for Augustine’s political thought has not been fully appreciated and is sidestepped in Smith’s volume. This is not a criticism of Smith per se; religious coercion is a hornets’ nest he was probably wise to avoid. But there are disturbing compatibilities between O’Donovan’s Christendom and Augustine’s coercion that deserve further examination. Augustine writes in defense of imperial force against the Donatists from his earliest writings against them until well after he began writing City of God. He dedicates City of God to Marcellinus, the imperial commissioner who oversaw the Council of Carthage in 411 that unleashed Roman aggression against the Donatists. City of God 5.26 praises Theodosius not just for his humility, which Smith mentions, but also for destroying pagan statues, which he does not (pp. 152–53). And Augustine’s most notorious defense of religious coercion is written to Boniface, the Roman general Smith features prominently as a recipient of Augustine’s encouragement to Christian political engagement (pp. 197–201). (Smith alludes to this background but does not address it explicitly.) Is there not a sense in which Marcellinus, Boniface, and other imperial officials who persecuted the Donatists were indeed fulfilling a civil mandate ‘to facilitate the mission of the church’? ⁵ For how else, for Augustine, could citizens develop virtue except by converting to Jesus Christ?

Race and Formation

The last chapter of Awaiting the King treats what Smith seems to consider the severest challenge to the Cultural Liturgies project. In The Christian Imagination, Willie Jennings details how virtue-based tradition and liturgical ritual did little to prevent colonialists from supporting transatlantic slavery but rather reinforced their complicity in it. ⁶ The royal chronicler Zurara perceived the suffering of the Africans being sold in the Portuguese slave market, but he justified their sorrow according to divine providence, which he believed would bring about slaves’ conversion to Christianity. The Jesuit José de Acosta was steeped in the Thomist tradition, but he enfolded Christian theology into a colonialist logic.

Smith’s reflections on these matters display refreshing honesty and self-examination, as he acknowledges the difficulty of Jennings’s critique even as he defends his basic project. Smith’s responses are: 1) He has always acknowledged the possibility of vicious liturgies that form us in sin rather than virtue. 2) Formation extends beyond rote liturgical participation of the sort depicted, for instance, in the baptism scene in Godfather with Michael Corleone. Liturgy is not an empty ritual but a way of life. 3) We should indeed investigate how liturgy can be coopted toward vicious ends. 4) Complete holiness is an eschatological hope that will not be fully realized in this life, when we will inevitably confront malformation. 5) Worship is not instrumental. We worship because God has commanded us, not because it makes us better disciples.

I am not convinced Smith has satisfactorily addressed Jennings’s critique, and I suspect he knows it. The catastrophe Jennings details in The Christian Imagination indicts a far wider range of actors than Smith suggests. The worry is not that the church has its occasional Michael Corleones, à la Augustine’s arguments concerning the wheat and the tares. It is the whole of Western Christianity that compares to the Corleone family, and it is the entirety of its tradition that demands re-narration.

In Desiring the Kingdom, Smith listed a series of practices he commends for their value in formation: baptism, eucharist, preaching, prayer, and so forth. ⁷ Each of these elements is, of course, central to Christian life. The question is how they will form us if we only participate in them in homogeneously white, wealthy communities. Smith is not insensitive to this concern. In the same volume, he stresses the importance of neighborhoods and living environments, encouraging Christian colleges, for instance, to foster off-campus intentional communities where students can learn a kind of ‘urban monasticism’. ⁸ He also worries that ‘our Christian colleges and universities generate an army of alumni who look pretty much like the rest of their suburban neighbors, except that our graduates drive their SUVs, inhabit their executive homes, and pursue the frenetic life of the middle class and the corporate ladder “from a Christian perspective.”’ ⁹

But these concerns do not occupy a central part of Smith’s project, and they do not penetrate to the heart of Jennings’s challenge. Racial segregation is the most significant division of American Christianity, where over 40 per cent of churches do not include a single person of a different racial-ethnic group, ¹⁰ and only 10 per cent of churches meet a sociologist’s definition of ‘interracial’, such that no racial group makes up more than 80 per cent of the congregation. ¹¹ (To my knowledge, there are no major studies of socioeconomic diversity in church settings, a remarkable lacuna for our understanding of Christian formation.) This lack of diversity is a problem, for it is not just practices that shape us; it is the material composition of our communities, which reflect the places where we live. Those who live in wealthier white neighborhoods will naturally participate in schools, churches, and other organizations of the same demographic. The best liturgical practices are powerless in such contexts because they already traffic in racial and socioeconomic division. When wealthy Christians participate in service projects, for instance, they replicate a colonialist mentality, retaining a sense of superiority and power as the often dark-skinned objects of their benevolence continue to represent the ‘other’. It remains for these communities to experience the joining and intimacy Jennings commends as a model for racial progress.

The upshot of Jennings’s critique is not to jettison the Cultural Liturgies project. Smith has immeasurably enriched our understanding of Christian formation by stressing the primacy of desire over reason, and this framework retains great promise for the healing of our social divisions. The question is how our desires are formed. I would suggest extending this discussion beyond liturgical practices to the communities and places that shape our identity. We will not care about race, poverty, and oppression if we do not embody solidarity with the victims of injustice. For ‘we are what we love’, ¹² and we love where we live.