God and the Commonweal
In his wonderful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God, Robert Wilken not only provides a fine introduction to the fathers of the Church, he also offers an overview of the fundamental themes of the Catholic wisdom tradition.
Chapter Eight, “Happy the People Whose God is the Lord,” draws principally upon Saint Augustine’s great work, The City of God. To commemorate the feast day of the Bishop of Hippo, an excerpt from Wilken’s chapter:
Augustine offers no theory of political life in the City of God. But he shows that God can never be relegated to the periphery of a society’s life. That is why the book discusses two cities. He wishes to draw a contrast between the life of the city of God, a life that is centered on God and genuinely social, and life that is centered on itself. Augustine wished to redefine the realm of the public to make place for the spiritual, for God.
As Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury has observed, the City of God is a book about the “optimal form of corporate human life” in light of its “last end.” In Augustine’s view, “It is life outside the Christian community which fails to be truly public, authentically political. The opposition is not between public and private, church and world, but between political virtue and political vice. At the end of the day, it is the secular order that will be shown to be ‘atomistic’ in its foundations.”
A society that has no place for God will disintegrate into an amoral aggregate of competing, self-aggrandizing interests that are destructive of the commonweal.
Fr. Imbelli –
What is “the wisdom tradition”? I mean this is as a purely theoretical question. What is it? What are the markers of wise teachings? What are the markerss of a wise person? What justifies anyone’s claim to wisdom? Why ought we to accept their teachings? *Liking* or even *loving* what the thoughtful people (or *feeling* people) have to say is surely itself alone not a justification for accepting their teachings. (Or is it?)
ISTM that if the Church does not these answer these questions persuasively it will continue to lose its young.
Ann,
I may not understand fully the import of your questions (at least the likelihood of addressing them on a blog), but with regard the first, here is an attempt I made to begin a discussion on the issue among some colleagues:
“The Catholic Wisdom Tradition is founded upon a vision of reality as purposeful and imbued with meaning. It bases this conviction on its belief-ful seeing of what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ for the well-being of the world. Hence the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity are constitutive of the Tradition. This faith is not inimical to reason, but calls reason to its most ample exercise, even as it finally recognizes its own limits and need for completion. The Tradition fosters a sacramental consciousness and imagination that has inspired aesthetic masterpieces in prose and poetry, painting and music. Its incarnational and communal sensitivity also underlies its concern for the common good and the promotion of justice in the world. Finally, the Tradition is embodied in and borne by a concrete historical community: the Church.”
It would, of course, take a whole book (like Wilken’s) or a two-semester course to begin to flesh that out.
Fr. Imbelli reports that Robert Wilken writes: “A society that has no place for God will disintegrate into an amoral aggregate of competing, self-aggrandizing interests that are destructive of the commonweal.”
Aside from the fact that I suspect that every “commonweal” will sooner or later disintegrate for one reason or another, I might well agree with with Wilken if I knew just what his remark is meant to entail.
i do believe that I ought to pray both for my own society and for the rest of humanity. I do believe that I ought to try to understand and act on the gospel’s implications for how my society ought to function, what goals it should pursue, and how it should pursue them.
I also know that I must never claim that I know exactly what God wants and from He wants it. The Spirit works in His own ways, ways never devoid of mystery.
Likewise, I am aware of the horrors of historical periods like the Wars of Religion, fought by peopl wh claimed to be God’s appointed agents. I do not fear that we are on the verge of another “war of religion,” but I do fear blaspheming by proclaiming that the agenda I come up with is God’s agenda. Or at least, what His agenda ought to be.
“This faith is not inimical to reason, but calls reason to its most ample exercise, even as it finally recognizes its own limits and need for completion.”
Hmmmmm. What would something that IS inimical to reason look like? Presumably, it would be more than mere contradiction, but what?
Fr, Imbelli –
Thanks for the explication. It seems that I myself am a product of that tradition, and I have no problem with that basic world-view. However, it seems that for many the Church does not have that privileged position in such a view. Perhaps the word “privileged” reflects a basic problem for the young?
As you can see, my problem with that view, or maybe just your sketch of it, is that it doesn’t seem to bring reasons for *accepting it* rather than another world view. say a secular humanist one. Hence my basically epistemological questions having to do with how one can tell wisdom when we find it and why is it that we should think that it’s important. I’ve read Augustine’s Confessions, but how many people’s minds does convert to the Church these days/ Granted, his City of God still sits on my bookshelf unread (sigh). But nothing that the Augustinians I’ve read or read about prompt me to dig into it. So I can imagine that the typical undergraduate won’t be persuaded to read it any time soon either. Does Wilken get into these sorts of questions?
Maybe my question should be: how are the times of the early Christians like ours? What were the questions that they were asking that young people, especially, are asking today? (I’m convinced that we read only those authors whose questions are the same as our own.)
Ann,
The ongoing task of theology is to try to “give reasons for the hope that is in us” (1 Peter 3:15). The fathers of the Church did this in an exemplary way, but we cannot simply repeat their achievement. Instructed by them, we must take up the challenge that you pose in our own day and cultural setting.
I have the luxury of a two-semester effort to do this in my undergraduate course, “Exploring Catholicism.” The readings draw heavily from the bible (of which the students are relatively uninformed), but I use many supplemental readings, including articles by Luke Johnson, Walter Brueggemann, Robert Barron, as well as the poems of Hopkins and short stries of Flannery O’Connor. And I keep looking for appropriate readings that connect with the students’ experience.
One last point. I agree that we must seek to make contact with young peoples’ questions; but a not small task of education is to help them refine and ask new questions.
Although I like Robert Wilken and Rowan Williams as people, I cannot subscribe to their eulogies of Augustine on this point. The dualism between a godly society and the civitas diaboli overrides the autonomy of the secular realm, as recovered for Christian thought by Thomas Aquinas with the help of Aristotle. The medieval theocracy embodied in the institution of the inquisition appealed rightly or wrongly to Augustine, and we much overcome this evil heritage before holding up Augustine as a model. Otherwise we are bound to be misunderstood in modern society.
Joseph O’,
I suspect that both RW and RW would reciprocally express their fondness for you “as people.” They might well add, however, that Augustine is more “dialectical” than you or the Dominican inquisitors seem to allow.
Both church on earth and earthly society are “corpora permixta” in which the city of God and the city of man intermingle until judgment day when the wheat and the chaff will be finally separated.
It has also been said that “If we read a great deal of theology, we shall need a great deal of faith.
(Attributed to Wilfred Knox, brother of Ronald Knox, in “The Knox Brothers” by Penelope Fitzgerald.)
Any theology or wisdom literature that is not manifested in our actions (Mt 25:40, Mt 5:38-42) is nothing more than a pedantic exercise.