Bonds of Imperfection available in Paperback
Bonds of Imperfection
- ISBN-10:
- 080284975X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780802849755
- Pub. Date:
- 12/30/2003
- Publisher:
- Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
- ISBN-10:
- 080284975X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780802849755
- Pub. Date:
- 12/30/2003
- Publisher:
- Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
Bonds of Imperfection
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802849755 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2003 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 330 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
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Bonds of Imperfection
Christian Politics, Past and PresentBy Oliver O'Donovan Joan Lockwood O'Donovan
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2003 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing CompanyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8028-4975-X
Introduction
The essays collected here are explorations in 'the political' - in political agency, political action, political institutions, and political society - from a perspective formed by the Bible and the Latin theological tradition. All the essays engage at some level with contemporary understandings and issues, and all bring to bear in a critical and constructive manner the theological resources of the older tradition. There is, nevertheless, a shift of emphasis between Parts 1 and 2: from recovering significant theoretical moments and strands of the Christian political past to analyzing present thought and practice in their light.This collection forms an accompaniment to our compilation of texts, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought which intended to provide extensive access to the tradition with the aid of translations, introductions, and commentary. In that enterprise we were naturally constrained from undertaking more sustained analysis of individual thinkers and more developed arguments about specific issues. It is a selection of these that the following essays offer, with, we hope, a progressively unfolding coherence, even though their composition spanned more than a decade of our intellectual labor. It need hardly be saidthat the material in From Irenaeus to Grotius is capable of inspiring many other discussions than those we have taken up here.
The engagement with contemporary approaches, ideas, and institutions is pre-eminently but by no means exclusively critical, while that with the older tradition is largely constructive. If there is an imbalance here, it may be viewed as a corrective to a consensus within and without the church that regards the prevailing liberal-democratic institutions of the West as wholly normative for all times and occasions, even while it finds a continual source of vexation in their fallout. This consensus admits a variety of approaches to the older theo-political tradition, from the more flattering to the more dismissive, but hardly allows it to speak with its own voice. It is regarded complacently as the foundation, albeit inchoate, of future political progress, or disowned guiltily as the shadow cast by a theocratic civilization, and in either case it is denied its proper integrity and authority. Taking the tradition seriously implies a confrontational stance, not necessarily towards contemporary institutions but towards the commonplaces which are universally supposed to shore them up - the common-places of republican freedom and self-government, of popular sovereignty and the rights of individuals and communities.
The diversity of their subject matter should not obscure the ways in which these essays cohere, in respect both of the pre-modern and of the modern traditions. With respect to the former, they identify the political with the sphere of judgment, divine and human, that gives order to the human community in history. This judgment is demanded as a penultimate response to human waywardness, for the sake of preserving human society and creation against the ravages of sin, rather than to accomplish their redemption and restoration. At the same time, it is the sphere in which human rebellion against God achieves collective solidarity, definitively manifested in the crucifixion of Christ and the persecution of his witnesses. The political remains a morally ambiguous realm, an instrument of God's merciful dealings with humankind and an object of his wrath, subject to the risen Christ on both accounts. It is not insulated from the resurrection conquest of Christ and the signs of the coming kingdom, but it does not belong among them. The justice and peace achieved by earthly politics, while bound to God's law in nature and Scripture, is transient and tragically deficient. Only with the arrival of the heavenly kingdom can the political, purified of its earthly texture, be coterminous with redeemed society under the rule of Christ. Until then, it is not political action but the communion of the church that looks forward to the city of God.
The modern tradition, on the other hand, is portrayed as detaching the foundations of the political from the judgment of God, with one of two results: either the political is merely a modus vivendi among self-interested human beings, or, if human sinfulness is also suppressed, it is the powerhouse for collective self-perfection. In this last form it becomes the administrative agent of technological mastery and cultural expression. In either case the overriding political good is the enhancement of human freedom, individual and collective. But this is not the freedom which the older tradition knew as "evangelical freedom": it is no longer law-governed, obedient, and a fitting response to "what is" - to what the Father has made, the Son has redeemed and the Spirit is sanctifying. Projected as autonomous self-possession, freedom assaults the intrinsic forms of sharing and solidarity that comprise moral community: it assaults not only our communication in the created goods and structures by which we live well but also our solidarity as the object of God's condemnation, forgiveness, and renewal. These essays probe sub specie libertatis the intellectual and practical pitfalls of the modern political inheritance.
In their advocacy of the older theo-political tradition, the essays in this volume have not abandoned the constructive political task of the present. They do not recollect the tradition in an antiquarian mood of regret and nostalgia, but attempt to show its perennial relevance. And if this attempt is at all successful, it alters the horizons of present political understanding and opens up possibilities for action. All legitimate criticism illuminates the way forward. The most trenchant form of complacency is acquiescence in contemporary certainties as a datum of historical necessity. Only when criticism becomes totalized, as in postmodernist indifference, does it become a council of despair, self-defeating and without point.
* * *
The opening essay of the collection, "History and Politics in the Book of Revelation," forms a programmatic introduction. In John of Patmos's apocalyptic overcoming of the political order Oliver O'Donovan discerns an imagined space for hopeful common action. In contrast to readings that see in John's "mythologizing" the negating transcendence of history and politics, O'Donovan construes the three cycles of seven visions of Revelation as a progressive unfolding of God's judgment in history. This judgment is initially depicted as an outworking of historical necessity, but its political features are successively exhibited, in its vindication of order and created goodness, its response to the "demands of outraged justice," and its restoration of individual and communal freedom.
Passing from the pre-messianic politics of the first two cycles to the messianic politics of the third cycle, John projects earthly empire as a phenomenon with two aspects, historical and eschatological. On the one hand it is a perennial phenomenon of sinful politics, naturally fated to self-destruction; on the other, it is a disclosure of eschatological evil, a messianic and trinitarian parody with two totalitarian faces, violent oppression and ideological deception. As a perennial political enterprise, imperial dominion weds military to economic subjugation, until it finally collapses under the weight of massed rebellion. As a disclosure of eschatological evil, it exposes its nihilistic core: devoid of created good, it collapses into pure negation, the assault upon God, the source and principle of being.
John's cyclical unfolding of God's judgment in history is also an unfolding of the eschatological paradox of freedom: the necessity of "immanent justice" which diminishes human freedom is converted by God's Word into "the freedom of the saints' corporate obedience." His concluding vision of divine triumph divides into the victory of the Son in which the saints participate and the judgment of the Father to which they remain subject. But the judgment of God on history is a reconciling and fulfilling one, anticipating the new creation, as emerges from the hidden identity of the opposing cities: the "Great City" and the "Holy City," Babylon-Rome and the New Jerusalem.
Augustine's City of God, the shaping text of the Western theo-political tradition, follows Revelation in locating the meaning of history and of politics in terms of the opposing "ends" of the Two Cities. But whereas Revelation and Books 20-22 of The City of God consider these ends in a "strictly eschatological sense," Book 19 considers them in a prolegomenal manner: as "horizons of action that generate their contrasting moral characters." According to "The Political Thought of City of God 19," the Two Cities comprise for Augustine true and false resolutions of the dilemma for action posed by historical contingency, true and false answers to the question of the "highest good." The City of God is the community of "perfect and eternal peace," the Earthly City the community of "mortal peace." It is with the latter community that Augustine aligns the politics of the res publica, denying the possibility of an earthly polity defined in terms of "right" (ius) or "common interest" (utilitas).
Oliver O'Donovan shows how this alignment is resisted by both the idealist and realist accounts of Augustine's political thought current in contemporary liberalism. While idealists read Augustine as admitting an earthly commonwealth - Christian or (at least) monotheistic - of relative justice, realists read him as admitting amorally neutral commonwealth which, although laying no claim to justice in the strong sense, is unaligned with either city. Central to both accounts is a misunderstanding of the "common use" of mortal necessities by the two cities. Failing to distinguish common use from common utility, they impute a "consensus of wills" (compositio voluntatum) between the cities, and attribute membership in the Earthly City to members of the Heavenly City, whereas the latter merely use the Earthly City's own consensus without participating in it. Both accounts, in effect, attribute a greater or lesser degree of "relative justice" to the civil polity, whereas Augustine reserves that for the peace of the earthly church.
Consequently, neither the idealist nor the realist interpretation grasps clearly the implications of the church's justice for civil polity. The justice of sins forgiven issues in civil justice, the just rule of the justified sinner, the Christian prince whose supramundane virtues are of benefit to civil government precisely because they answer to "'the right' as it is generally recognized and universally desired." At the same time, the justice of sins forgiven remains for Augustine a "superimposition" on civil peace that it "can function quite well without." The key to civil rule without justice lies in Augustine's Platonic conception of the predatory dependence of human vice on virtue, of moral disorder on order, which enables even "manifestly vicious communities" to "function as organized societies." On the one hand, the essence of earthly rule - "dominion" - expresses the disordered will of fallen humanity, the individual and collective vice of pride; on the other, the structured vice of dominion fulfills God's providential purpose of curtailing the disorder flowing from pride. The just rule of the Christian emperor, therefore, does not extricate empire from the demonic course of the earthly city envisaged by John of Patmos, but is a sign of God's coming judgment and restoration of human society.
The idealist determination to extricate political rule from its demonic history has been a dominant feature of past as well as present treatments of Augustine. The medieval papal tradition of "political Augustinianism" (to use a popular scholarly nomenclature) was a project of Christianizing political authority by assimilating it to God's work of salvation. This followed the twofold route of (a) subordinating civil to ecclesiastical government, teleologically and legally, and (b) juridicalizing ecclesiastical government. In putting his definitive stamp on the project, Pope Gregory VII ("Hildebrand")3 was fully persuaded (not least by his own experience!) of the demonic character of unregenerate secular rule, and equally persuaded that its redemption lay in strong clerical (especially papal) guidance and oversight. For him it was not a question of making pious use of, or superimposing Christian virtue on, the hellbent path of civil rule, but of redirecting its path heavenward, to Rome's political and legal supremacy. Justice was available to civil as to ecclesiastical judgment and law, but it descended in a seamless garment from Christ's Vicar.
However, while papal political theology habitually blurred the distinction between God's providential and salvific action, medieval Augustinianism never lost sight of the postlapsarian status of human government, or "jurisdiction." It was most jealously guarded in Franciscan theology, on account of the interconnectedness in the patristic inheritance of political rule and property. For Franciscan theology was concerned before all else with expounding and defending the order's Rule of absolute poverty that committed the brothers to the total renunciation of property and of individual and collective ownership, as well as to severe material deprivation. In the third essay, "Christian Platonism and Nonproprietary Community," Joan O'Donovan situates the Franciscan "theology of poverty" within the Christian Platonist tradition of trinitarian and christological moral realism ('realism' in the schoolmen's sense), and explores its historical contributions to ecclesiology and political thought, as well as its contemporary timeliness.
Against the backdrop of a papal church endowed with extensive property and jurisdiction, the Franciscan Minister General, Bonaventure, authoritatively expounded evangelical perfection as the imitation of Christ's freely accepted humiliation of physical destitution, powerlessness, and suffering. His core ethical insight was into the intimate relationship between pride and covetousness in the disordered love of the soul (and analogously, of society): that the soul's "consuming will to possess" other beings and things "is always in order to aggrandize its powers as privately possessed, as belonging exclusively to itself rather than to God." Hence the Franciscan discipline of renouncing "not only the relative abundance of ecclesiastical possession but also the positive legal rights connected with it" was "an efficacious sign that the apostolic wayfarer is not a self-possessor," not a proprietor of his physical and spiritual powers, but rather "possessed by Christ." The discipline both manifested and reinforced the individual's surrender of his own will.
Despite the solitary cast of Franciscan discipleship, Bonaventure conceived non-proprietary existence in communal as well as individual terms, speculatively attributing it (in Augustinian fashion) to the communities of created and sanctified humanity: to Adamic society, on the one hand, and to the communion of saints ('the just') on the other, who live by natural and divine 'right' alone without the need of positive human 'right' (law). It was, however, John Wyclif in the next century who gave extensive theological, metaphysical, epistemological, and ecclesiological development to non-proprietary community. For Wyclif, created and perfected human community was essentially trinitarian - formed by the Father's self-communication in Christ through the Holy Spirit - and as such comprised a freely "communicating and communicable possession and use" of spiritual and material goods. Only sin disrupted this free communication of resources, necessitating humanly contrived and forcibly imposed constraints such as property right. Wyclif accepted the Augustinian thesis that restrictive proprietorship ("civil dominion") had no independent validity apart from righteous communicative possession and use of goods ("evangelical dominion"). However, contrary to the papalist conclusion that the church had superior jurisdiction over all earthly property, Wyclif concluded that the clerical estate as a whole should be non-propertied, concretely manifesting the evangelical dominion of christological community that undergirds all valid civil proprietorship.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bonds of Imperfection by Oliver O'Donovan Joan Lockwood O'Donovan Copyright © 2003 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Excerpted by permission.
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