Love and citizenship: Augustine and the ethics of liberalism (Saint Augustine)

This study offers an interpretive reading of Saint Augustine with constructive implications for Augustinian social ethics, liberal political theory, and modern religious thought. It proposes a political ethic that includes concepts like respect, equality, and reciprocity. But, by aligning Augustinian caritas with a feminist “ethic of care,” it promotes love as an undertheorized and (too often) privatized virtue that is rejected or only weakly valued in both liberalism and Augustinianism. Theorizing love provides liberal theory with a viable way of thinking about virtue and motivation that takes it beyond a preoccupation with epistemology. It also reorients the Augustinian tradition by elevating a core aspect of Augustine's theological grammar that was central to his engagement with Platonism and Stoicism: the basic Christian aporia of love for God and love for neighbor. This move reveals how Christological transformation of the classical emphasis on love and the reformation of desire. While it pursues the logic of an Augustinian liberalism, the study also shows the normative value of cross-fertilizing these two traditions. The study distinguishes three types of Augustinian liberalism (realist, Rawlsian, and robust) and three corresponding central virtues of each type (hope, justice, and love). Through an analogy with liberal feminism, it defends the third type that recognizes both the limits and the possibilities of politics as well as the shortcomings of certain accounts of autonomy and emotion. The major part of the study considers two powerful challenges representatively raised by Hannah Arendt: (1) a Kantian challenge to political love as such, and (2) a Lutheran challenge to Augustinian love in particular. The study responds by redeeming Augustine's categories of “use” and “enjoyment” as resources for the phenomenology of citizenship. They serve to release politics from pressures it can not bear and overcome the self-deceptive and self-enclosed anxieties about otherness that often generates antiliberalism. The study imagines a better ethics for liberalism, one less susceptible to its critics because it is informed by the Augustinian tradition as well as the historic moral achievements of liberal ideas, practices, and institutions.