In this book Peter Iver Kaufman analyzes and reflects on the life and writings in political context of two Christian thinkers from very different epochs in order to determine not so much their systematic political philosophies as their attitudes toward political involvement and the betterment of society. And, while admitting that both wrote and said so much that many meanings can be found in them, he sees them as believing that politics and governance could at best be useful in staving off threats to the true faith; to go further and invest governmental power with dignity was for them to be “incorrectly political” (224). That government could ameliorate the sinful and hopeless way of the world was for them an illusion. According to Kaufman they came to regard the realm of politics and power with distrust and engagement in it as little more than dutiful penance. Kaufman rejects the views of some recent interpreters of Augustine that he had at least some chastened hope for marginal improvement of the earthly city; Christians were only “resident aliens” in this world (127). Nor for Kaufman is More's Utopia (1516) an expression of earthly hope. Kaufman maintains that it has not been recognized “how sordid political practice” seemed to his two subjects (1).
The author makes his case in a series of chapters that begin with the examination of Augustine's budding career as rhetorician and his eventual disgust with the bad faith of an occupation built on telling lies that speaker and auditors alike knew were lies. The next chapter describes Augustine's engagement in the Pelagian controversy as an awakening to the futility and hopelessness of fallen humanity's effort to build a better world. The subject of the third chapter is the Donatist controversy as leading Augustine to sanction coercion in religious matters at the same time that he recognized the limitations and compromises of such political involvement. The fourth emphasizes that his City of God points beyond the cycles of earthly failure to a celestial city of “new beginnings.”
Three chapters are devoted to Thomas More. The first portrays More advancing to prominence through the patronage of John Morton, who served as archbishop, cardinal, and lord chancellor, and gaining the attention of the young Henry VIII. Kaufman sees More as ambitious but guarded as he held positions of public service (143); struggling with the reconciliation of public life and true piety, More translated Gianfrancesco Pico's biography of his uncle, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, finding there both rules for living a devout life as a layman engaged with worldly affairs and preachments reminding that life is short and earthly glory vain. The second chapter on More takes up the enigma of Utopia, in which the Utopians' enlightened hedonism and mere natural religion seem to belie More's own deepest convictions. Kaufman finds in this work the incompatibility of Christian faith and public life—Utopia is the impossible dream, not a blueprint for the real world. The final chapter on More portrays the crisis precipitated by More's effort both to serve the king and to remain faithful to the old religious order. As for heretics, More thought government should suppress them as disruptive to good order.
The conclusion to the whole is clear: Augustine put off true justice to the celestial city and More to “no where” (182); both “renounced the expectation that ‘genuine justice’ could be achieved in time,” which the author takes as “a call for a more profound political pessimism” (227).
This is an intriguing book in which the author, who has previously specialized in the religious life and thought of Tudor England (though with attention to Augustine's influence), risks writing comparatively about figures from two very different times, revealing mastery of sources and secondary literature in both, and a willingness to make broad judgments. Like good books generally, it can rearrange a reader's perceptions. For this reader, it brought home how politicized was Augustine's thinking and acting (though not so much as that of Ambrose, as Kaufman points out). The young Augustine appears as a promising provincial on the make in the wider late Roman world, with high government posts within his reach, had he stuck to “rhetoric,” instead of being revolted by its falsehood (this revulsion clarifies his insistence on truth-telling and emphasis on God as truth); nonetheless as bishop he continued to find himself embroiled in politics. As for More, no one ever doubted that the world of his activity was profoundly political and that he was ambitious to play a leading role in it; Kaufman insightfully probes his involvement with and attitude toward politics.
Does it work to pair these two figures from different times? On the whole it enables the author to undertake a fresh and illuminating reading of the material. Perhaps Kaufman best ties his two subjects together by their reactions to heresy: Donatists and proto-Protestant “evangelical anticlericals” (144) both threatened a right Christian order and had to be intimidated by government. But in significant respects More and Augustine contrast: More was a politician, an important figure in law and government who was caught in the religious upheavals of the reign of Henry VIII, but hardly a great theologian, while Augustine was a theologian whose influence in the development of western Christian thought is without parallel. More was a Renaissance Christian humanist who, although tantalizing his readers with a utopian world, was so closely tied to a political and ecclesiastical establishment and so worried about social control (a prime concern of Utopia) and the threat of heresy that he became a harrier of heretics. Augustine, on the other hand, descendent of the defeated Carthaginians, had understandably something of an outsider's skepticism about the role of empires in human history.
This is a stimulating and thought-provoking book.
