Charles Mathewes has written a splendid Augustinian reflection on contemporary politics and culture. His primary question is whether moral confidence is possible, given that the moral life, at the best of times, is fraught with ambivalence and darkness, and more so during these post–September 11 “dark times.” This book is a call to hope directed primarily at Christians, but non-Christians have much to learn as well. Unlike other calls to hope in contemporary politics and culture, Mathewes's call is neither shallow optimism nor millenarian. His call is realistic. But unlike other Augustinian realists, Reinhold Niebuhr for example, Mathewes places hope before the darkness that lies at the heart of that other realism. While some of Mathewes's formulations of “dark times” can be overwrought, he has provided the beginnings for a discourse that builds up the reader through hope.
The title, Republic of Grace, refers to the Augustinian eschatological insight that the City of God obliges us to see beyond the limitations of our political society and to clarify just where to look to see those limitations. Yet, as Mathewes insists throughout his volume, his realistic call to hope is not “simply negative, not simply a scolding frown, angry at the nations for being imperfect. It is also affirmative, joyously proclaiming liberation, calling politics beyond itself” (239). His argument strives to identify a middle ground between various forms of millenarianism and apocalypticism and what appears to be their opposite, listless despair in the possibility of the moral life, frequently referred to as “choice-ism” or consumerism. Mathewes asks how one can live with moral confidence, amid the ambivalence of the moral life, without sliding into either of these two dead-ends.
The book is divided into two parts (plus an introduction). Part 1, titled “Seeing as Christians,” provides an overview of the main contemporary moral, political, and spiritual challenges facing people in the West (and especially Americans). He covers the challenges with a combination of Augustinian attentiveness to moral ambiguity and confidence, with a solid understanding of these challenges based on readings of some of the most insightful (and non-Augustinian) scholarly analysis available. In short, he draws upon the best available minds regardless of religious affiliation, just as Augustine drew upon the best Roman minds to understand his political, moral, and spiritual world. Part 2, titled “Looking Like Christians,” focuses more on means of cultivating hope in Western polities, and will be considered after we consider part 1.
Chapter 2 leads off part 1 by considering the war against political Islam. After considering the utopian ideology of al-Qaeda, Mathewes provides a succinct account of al Qaeda's modernism, even claiming “life inside al-Qaeda probably feels more like The Office than the Death Star” (60). The point of this analytical approach is not to excuse them, nor to claim superficially that “we're all the same.” Rather, it is to alert readers to the common “modern” trends that challenge both the West and al-Qaeda: “The ambi-Americanism”—that which characterizes “people for whom the violence of their vehement hatred toward all things American is directly related to the depth of their attraction toward those same things”—“is actually part of a larger ambivalence, an ambivalence to modern life itself” (67). This chapter and others treat challenges facing the West not in dualistic or Manichaean terms that characterize political debate (e.g., “us versus them”) but provide a broader analysis that not only demonstrates the shortcomings of these dualisms but provides moral hope that a way out of these dualisms is possible.
Chapter 3 considers the limitations of American triumphalism and its opposite, anti-Americanism. This chapter provides an astute and concise overview of the origins of America's “revolutionary empire” as well as its contemporary critics, but it also provides a realistic assessment of what good the “revolutionary empire” does in the world. Like a good Augustinian, after observing all the trouble American foreign policy has caused, he points out that the alternatives to American hegemony are probably worse. Chapter 4 considers the ills of consumerism and the pathologies associated with it, including boredom (the modern “joyless quest for joy,” as Leo Strauss put it), various forms of escapism, individualism (in the Tocquevillian sense, though Mathewes treats this category too narrowly), and generally, an “apatheism” that translates into a belief that “reality is fungible” and our moral choices make little difference and have no significance.
Part 2, “Looking Like Christians,” then considers a more thoroughgoing Augustinian moral ethic for our situation. Mathewes, with some success, treats this ethic not in terms of doctrine or even primarily in terms of philosophical or theological concepts. Rather, looking or seeing like Christians begins with how the moral life is practiced without prior reflection, that is, how it is truly lived out. For example, chapter 5, “Love and Responsibility,” considers the nature of authority. But instead of providing a defense of authority based either on scripture or on utility, Mathewes focuses on how authority is what we call the “accepted framework of orientation, our primordial means of depicting the world to ourselves” (154). In other words, to make a moral choice, no less to live a moral life, is to accept a form of authority, and we do that all the time. Mathewes's (and Augustine's) point is another version of that stated by Immanuel Kant when he lists God, immortality of the soul, and freedom as postulates of practical reason.
Further, what we choose is to choose what (or whom) we serve. Thus, the subsequent discussion revolves around elaborating what or whom is most reasonable to serve. His discussion reorients the reader to consider the nature of political authority, which must be understood, as all authority must be, as “on loan.” All authority resembles the position of the teacher and the student: “education does things to students that neither students nor teachers fully comprehend, and plants seeds that neither can control” (165), a reminder that authority is never something the one in authority can control. It is on loan.
Chapter 6, “Faith and Political Commitment,” considers the manner in which all political allegiances are acts of faith, which explains why Augustinians (among others) have so frequently treated them in terms of idolatry. The chapter thus considers the internal limitations contained within political authority and implied by Christ's injunction to give unto Caesar what is his, and God what is his.
Chapter 7, “Hope and Political Engagement,” returns to the central theme of the book by considering ways of cultivating hope among (especially Christian) citizens. This chapter is a somewhat disappointing denouement to the book because it is there that the limitations of Mathewes's articulation of hope, the book's guiding theme, come through most clearly. He provides an insightful outline of the moral life as a “pilgrimage of our affections” and the Eucharist as “training for longing for the time being.” He concludes the chapter with a perfunctory account of how hope shapes political life.
The problem with this chapter is that while Mathewes treats hope within the context of the moral and religious life as a practice, he fails to elaborate the full significance of this insight here or in the introduction, where he first elaborates it. Mathewes rightly observes that hope is connected to the web of other virtues, but he fails to give full significance to his insight that hope is only found within the day-to-day practice of the moral life. Hope contains the moral life, which contains us. And so, one cannot elaborate the meaning of hope without also elaborating the moral life from within. This also requires one to confront how, from within the perspective of the moral life, one gains moral confidence. Mathewes's reflective account of the moral life, with its language of how hope can be “cultivated,” misses this process because it does not adequately enter within the horizon of the moral horizon as a more meditative approach would do. So too does Mathewes's perfunctory treatment of “how political engagement shapes hope” (240). One would have expected some reference in this discussion to Tocqueville, who famously claimed that in political engagement “the heart is enlarged.” Tocqueville's statement was his way of observing that the moral practice of self-government is more expansive than the theoretical categories we bring to it (and what that implies for our understanding of the moral life in modern life). Augustine provides deeper resources than does Tocqueville to understand this paradox.
How is it that, in the middle of our moral endeavors, we discover that hope does not fail? Mathewes's Republic of Grace brings us to the point of seeing the necessity of asking that question. I hope his subsequent writings embrace that question with greater clarity.
