6 - Charitable citizenship

Summary

But the state of grace this natural act requires,

Have we the natural strength for it?

Molly Peacock, “There Must Be”

We have now seen how the theological virtues of faith and hope can inform a general picture of civic engagement, a “liturgy of citizenship.” But what about love? Augustinian theology sees love as the fundamental theological, ontological, and psychological truth about reality. Is love also politically and civically fundamental? How can it operate in the public realm?

Many thinkers seem to think that what politics does not need is love. They reverse Clausewitz's dictum: politics is the continuation of war by other means, and as such it must be carefully managed and controlled. Politics is precisely the realm where we manage to accommodate each other without asking for passionate investment in one another. To invite private passions back in is to court disaster.

That we appreciate these concerns is the signal achievement of the tradition of liberal political thought, from Hobbes and Locke forward. Out of an often salutary fear that a more ambitious political scope will lead to endless fratricidal conflict, this tradition urges us to quarantine existential questions, and to limit the political to those matters that (more or less) directly concern the public good. There is much wisdom in this aversion. But it begs the question of whether or not such ambitions can be fully purged from public affairs, whether fear and other negative motivations are sufficient to secure political order.