Studies in Christian ethics: Ancient, modern, and postmodern (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Saint Augustine, Aladair MacIntyre)

1. “Holiness and hermeneutics: On the centrality of incarnation to scriptural interpretation in Augustine 's “De Doctrina Christiana”. I interpret Augustine's difficult ethical contention that a person “supported by faith, hope, and charity, with an unshaken hold upon them, does not need the Scriptures except for the instruction of others.” The study considers intricacies of the relations of scripture and sanctification, sanctification and church, the “inner Teacher” and human teachers, human words and the Word Incarnate. I argue that the living Word is embodied, for Augustine, similarly in scripture, church, and the lives of holy people, and that a genuine; 2. “Rousseau's Adventure with Robinson Crusoe”. Rousseau “ruthlessly edits” (one critic puts it) Daniel Defoe's novel in his consideration of it in his own Emile. I reason that Rousseau seeks, by this, to illustrate the incompleteness and confusion of the modern bourgeois soul, which he sees as a consequence of truncated philosophies of early modern social-contract theorists. Rousseau wishes to demonstrate, I argue, that his social-contract predecessors had erred in their failure to appreciate the role of religion in integrating the human being with its political incarnation, the citizen. Without this appreciation, the philosophic architects of the modern bourgeois soul could not perceive what Rousseau perceived: Christianity is an impediment to human wholeness and just politics in modern societies.; 3. “MacIntyre's imprudence”. Alasdair MacIntyre presents Thomistic political ethics as necessarily antiliberal. A consequence of MacIntyre's antiliberalism is that his theorizing lacks practical application in a Western world of regnant liberalism. This is key: a theoretical approach to practical reason that lacks practicality is a paradox; it is an approach alien to MacIntyre's masters, Aristotle and Aquinas. For them, practical reasoning is reasoning in practice. Central to it is the pivotal moral and intellectual virtue of prudence. A public antiliberalism today is, I argue, a species of imprudence, and is antithetical to a full appropriation of the Aristotelian or Thomist tradition of ethico-political thought.