The Catholic Church has been struggling to come to grips with the modern state for two centuries and more. But Thomists have often looked away from worldly transformations, so as to construe politics in light of unchanging verities. Politics for a Pilgrim Church turns the Thomistic gaze back onto the passing world by connecting a classical account of civic virtue and the common good to the challenges of liberal pluralism. Despite the book's title and frame story, Bushlack's account speaks not so much to ecclesiology, nor to the problem of church and state, as to the question of citizenship. How is the Catholic (or Christian, or Thomist) to approach the issue of membership in a liberal society? The theme of the “pilgrim church” largely disappears from the central chapters of the book, but the image aptly illustrates Bushlack's answer, suggesting a real participation in the things of this world but also a transcendent perspective and heavenly destination. There is much here to appreciate.
The book sets up the problem with a historical summary of the church's quarrels with and about the modern state. Two Vatican Councils have sharply diminished ecclesial involvement in politics, which is now seen as the purview of the lay Catholic. This development gives prominence to the lay virtue that occupies the rest of the book, traditionally known as “general” or “legal” justice, which Bushlack rebrands as “civic virtue.” As its rather generic name suggests, civic virtue is not a specific virtue like moderation or mercy but instead a kind of metavirtue whose function is “to direct the acts of the virtues toward the common good of one's society” (33). It is, in short, the virtue that cares about the common good, so that the common good becomes the book's central theme.
Bushlack treats the common good in two different registers. The first retrieves its medieval meaning, drawing especially on Aquinas. This exposition lays great stress on the analogical character of the concept of the common good as the bridge between the Augustinian and Aristotelian elements that one finds in Aquinas. For Augustine, God is the common good of every creature and of the whole cosmos. In this light, civic virtue must be an “infused” virtue from God, a privilege of the Christian soul that enables natural beings to attain supernatural ends. In the Aristotelian vein, earthly communities are aimed at the life of virtue, a natural goal which does not require salvific grace to attain and so is open to all. The task of relating and ranking these analogous ends opens up the medieval problematic of the priority of state and church as well as the current theological controversy over nature and grace (to which Bushlack devotes an entire chapter). The proposed solution is that earthly politics is exclusively concerned with the latter, natural common good but that grace allows the Christian to see the larger theological ends that are served in the temporal. The specific contribution of a Thomistic account is to preserve the integrity of both final ends and, in today's world, to recall the transcendent dimension of the political.
The second register treats the practical question of how to promote the common good here and now, in modern pluralistic democracies. Such a discussion requires a major transposition from Aquinas's text and context. Here Bushlack is emphatically against any special place for the Christian or the Thomist, and generally opposes the “epistemic superiority” (199) and stridency that lead to culture wars in both church and state. Civic virtue today requires humbly seeking a “public consensus that defines the people's sense of the common good” (222) by means of democratic deliberation. Bushlack plainly aims to make the common good safe for democracy, but in doing so his account loses much of its Thomistic character. He endorses key liberal ideas as pillars of the common good today: Rawls's overlapping consensus, William Galston's account of liberal virtue, and Philip Pettit version of freedom as nondomination. It would seem that the nonliberal elements in Aquinas's vision—e.g., its orientation toward God or its theory of virtues and the good life—are pushed to the supernatural side of the analogy, to be taken up in private by any who are convinced by Christian rhetoric. The final constructive chapter renders the common good yet more politically docile by relying on the work of James Davison Hunter to argue that civic virtue is more a matter of culture than of politics. All in all, Bushlack's version of contemporary civic virtue works to enrich but not seriously to challenge the self-image of liberal polity (except in its doctrinaire, neutralist versions).
If the theory of the common good is the theme of the book, its countermelody focuses on the role of passions and rhetoric in civic virtue. The affective dimension is often absent from intellectualized treatments of the common good, but Bushlack makes a welcome return to the Aristotelian doctrine that the virtuous person feels rightly in addition to acting well. Civic virtue demands passion, for instance, anger at social injustice and compassion for those unjustly excluded. And the common good must be loved even when its specification is up for debate, which makes the Christian's theological-metaphysical conviction that there is such a thing as the common good a boon to liberal public discourse. The way to arouse such love in fellow-citizens is not philosophical proof but the rhetorical triumvirate of logos-ethos-pathos, of which the latter two frequently go missing in the culture-war stance that is one of the main targets of Bushlack's critique. The treatment of passions and rhetoric takes the account a helpful step towards the human factors that move people to seek the common good by deeds as well as words.
Bushlack's study has much to offer to Catholic or Christian readers, who are the primary audience of its political theology, and also to anyone interested in Aristotelian thought generally. If the prose is not always elegant, the argument as a whole moves fluidly over important intellectual terrain. The connection (or analogy) between Aquinas's theory and contemporary practice is the book's most promising aspect and also its most problematic. No study will perfectly elucidate the “middle axioms” (243) that connect metaphysics and practice, but the disjuncture between Augustine, Aristotle, and liberalism here seems acute. God, as the universal common good, is not adequately described as “a set of ideals or values that are embodied in a particular way of life” (212), which is Bushlack's general definition of the common good. Similarly, neither the Thomist nor the liberal is likely to characterize the benefits of modern citizenship as “the highest, most noble, and most divine good of natural human life” (215). One hopes that the dialogue that the book deserves to elicit will elaborate a more supple link between a classical philosophical treatment and a vision of the common good informed by liberal thought and values.
Open questions notwithstanding, Politics for a Pilgrim Church offers a fine example of contemporary Thomistic political thought and a glimpse into the internal dialogue of the Catholic Church as it calibrates its ancient traditions with modern politics.
