Our edited volume has been published!
I quote:
"Editors’ Introduction
Because the last several years have seen no dearth of Augustine volumes, another one requires justification. As the post-war consensus of the 20th century continues to unravel, the theme of crisis emerges with urgency: there is no understanding the course of the 21st century without thinking about crisis conditions. A loss of confidence in public, corporate, and religious institutions has cultivated a growing skepticism of liberalism across the political spectrum. This skepticism is exacerbated by population displacements fueling calls for revanchist ethno-states or nationalist turns against globalism. The increasingly vitriolic and partisan interpretation of the post–Westphalian nation-state paradigm, coupled with economic upheaval, devastating pandemics, growing income inequality, rampant political cynicism, and threats of environmental degradation discloses that the crisis extends beyond foreign peril or economic instability. It concerns the underpinning of social order itself.
The last time a crisis of this magnitude threatened, the influential philosopher of civilization crisis Charles Norris Cochrane looked to Augustine to provide interpretive wisdom. His classic Christianity and Classical Culture1was originally published during the nadir year of 1940, when the trajectory of World War II often seemed poised to crush both Christianity and any culture worth the name. Christianity and Classical Culture views crisis in a specific way. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the intellectual, moral, and spiritual resources of classical civilization proved inadequate to weather the all-encompassing storm of barbarian invasions, Roman institutional decline, and challenges faced by the young Christian Church. In Augustine’s day, neither the classical understanding of virtue, nor its attempted post-Augustan reconstitution, nor the renewed Romanitas of Constantinianism successfully resolved the crisis. The classical assumptions on which civilization relied made the crisis worse, blinding human beings to the real nature of the problem as it unfolded in history.
It is too early to compare the current crisis to the one that motivated Cochrane. In one important dimension, however, it may be more serious. Elites opposing fascism and communism in the 1940s shared the presuppositions of ethical monotheism, which if not necessarily providing the sole ground for explaining human rights and dignity, would at least provide explanatory support. As German Egyptologist Jan Assmann and others have illustrated, elites in the West have now repudiated this shared moral and religious framework.2 The legacy of May 1968 and other campus unrest, bolstered by critical theoretical and post-structuralist streams of thought, has exacerbated a crisis of authority that is still unfolding. We do not agree even on what it would mean to find our way.
Charles Mathewes has called attention precisely to this crisis of authority in what he considers “dark times”3 that he hopes Augustine can illuminate. Robert D. Kaplan has also focused on our contemporary disintegration of authority, a malaise he compares to the 5th century Augustinian era.4 If Cochrane profitably deploys Augustine to understand the inability of a cherished and long-held philosophical weltanschauung to account for calamitous events, so too can we.
To be clear, this volume offers no institutional roadmap out of 21st century crises. It does not presume that a “return to an orthodox Augustinian thought” is possible or even desirable. What this collection of essays does recognize, and as Cochrane argued, is that Augustine was at the vanguard of needed social, political, and spiritual change. He repudiated the anachronistic, threadbare classical and naturalistic explanations of reality. He replaced it with a robust phenomenology that granted individuals access to particulars of a novel social, political, and spiritual world-view, rejecting outmoded idealizations that no longer functioned. In doing so, he demonstrated frank and courageous acceptance of 5th-century conditions. If indeed we are at a similar crossroads, then Augustine is still instructive, because he demands of us that same frank and courageous acceptance of our conditions.
With respect to broad themes in the Augustinian corpus, such as freedom and identity and the separation of church and state, among others, which correspond to the different parts of the volume, our overlapping consensus with him is found by imitating Augustine and using him to see our conceptual chaos clearly and without illusions. Once we are able to do this, and with the memory of how Augustine approached related problems in mind, a way forward may be possible.
Complementing other volumes on Augustine, Augustine in a Time of Crisis brings together a diversity of fields and approaches. We are not limited to political or legal thought, nor to questions of selfhood and identity, issues often treated separately. This broad scope gives us our contributors an opportunity to provide concise but provocative interventions in our contemporary discussions. Sometimes complementing and sometimes challenging each other, our contributors consider themes of church and state (in light of debates challenging liberal assumptions about the separation of church and state), civil religion and elitism, and republicanism (a burgeoning field in Augustine studies).In considering republicanism as well as historical receptions of Augustine there may be overlap with contemporary historical work, but the volume is not exclusively contextual and is meant to be more accessible as a whole.With the chapter, “Augustine, Political Obedience and Chinese Family Churches,” authored by Professor Wei Hua of Huaqiao University in China, our volume broadens its perspective beyond the West.
The thematic divisions of the edited volume correspond broadly to the contested discourses that illustrate the difficulty of resolving disagreement within a broadly liberal framework. Of course, political theory cannot function without attempting to find consensus. Short of building consensus, however, clarifying possibilities and alternatives to better understand moral and political ends in a time of crisis is itself valuable, and the authors in this volume are determined to engage with Augustine as part of the effort."
Continue in the book:
1 Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).
2 Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
3 Charles Mathewes, The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times (Grand Rapids: Eerdemans, 2010).
4 Robert D. Kaplan, “Augustine’s World,” Foreign Policy 203 (2013): 16.
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