11 - Augustine and Platonic Political Philosophy: The Contribution of Joseph Ratzinger

Summary

Long before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, the young Joseph Ratzinger was known among Augustine scholars for his path-breaking studies of Augustine's ecclesiology. Later, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was known widely for speaking out on political issues and controversies of our day, particularly those related to the future of Europe and the place of Christianity within it. Rarely has anyone connected his interest in politics with his early writings on Augustine. In the past sixty years of scholarship on Augustine's political thought, Ratzinger has received barely a mention, and as far as I am aware, Michael Bruno's valuable 2014 monograph on the past century's interpretations of Augustine's political thought was the first ever to classify Ratzinger as even having offered such an interpretation. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Bruno is the second, the first being Ratzinger himself. In a 1990 public lecture titled “Europe: Chances and Dangers,” he made a number of bold claims about the historical importance of the “decisive interpretation” that Augustine had given to the “Platonic tradition … [of] political philosophy” and supported those claims with a footnote to a monograph chapter he wrote in 1961 on Augustine's debate with Roman “political theology.” Drawing on that chapter, Ratzinger now made a series of claims about Augustine (in relation to controversies over the meaning of Europe today) that must be striking to any scholar of Augustine's political thought and are worth quoting at length.

What can and ought Europe really to be, for itself and for the world? We open the path to answering this question when we look somewhat more closely into … the claim that a state without justice is nothing but a robber band grown immeasurably large…. [In its pre-Augustinian form,] this claim took concrete shape on the basis of real experiences of rulers who were in point of fact robbers. But its philosophical presuppositions lie deeper. To examine them, we are led into the heart of Greek and Roman political philosophy, in which the spiritual roots of Europe lie…. [Plato's basic political teaching, which Ratzinger here spends a page summarizing] means that a state that is basically agnostic with respect to God, one that builds justice only on majority opinions, declines in and of itself into a robber band.