As a bishop, preacher, theologian, and correspondent, Augustine engaged a range of publics by virtue of his role as both an ecclesial and political figure leader as well as the range of modes in which he wrote. He was also deeply concerned with the social, ethical, and political effects – for good and for ill – of a range of cultural media (including literature, philosophy, preaching, and rhetoric) as well as public events (including rites, and festivals, and spectacles). This panel considers this theme in Augustine's work in historical context as well as its ongoing relevance for engaging contemporary ethical and political matters.
The use of Augustine in presidential political rhetoric has shifted from Obama’s global liberal realism to the brash nationalist integralism of J.D. Vance’s most recent invocation of ordered love to justify the current administration’s policies on immigration and deportation. These two views appeal to conflicting faces of Augustine’s view of neighbor love and threaten to empty Augustine’s famous notion of properly ordered love and the virtue of humanity. Such opposing appeals do not indicate incoherence in Augustine’s view of neighbor love but rather stem from an inadequate grasp of the complexity of Augustine’s view of horizontally ordered love of neighbor. Augustine adapted the Stoic ethical concept of oikeiosis to depict the competing concentric circles of affection that social and political leaders must mediate in fulfillment of their role-specific obligation to those near and far.
The health and preservation of democratic institutions relies on pervasive practices, formal and informal, of social criticism and civic accountability. Such practices are necessary but prone to incur “characteristic damages,” often hardening polarization through cycles of confrontation, denunciation, and backlash. This paper proposes a way of conceptualizing and disciplining the work of democratic accountability through the theological notion of fraternal correction. I draw on Augustine’s account of fraternal correction as a work of mercy and an act of spiritual friendship, performed among social equals and ordered toward healing, rather than retribution or self-assertion. Augustine’s acceptance of the “rougher magics” of political coercion is well-known, but alongside this paternalist, hierarchical model of political rule he recognized a place for a distributed, fraternal mode of accountability, independent of formal office-holding, whose medium was the word, not the sword, and which cut across gradients of social status.
Given increasing religious and political plurality, conscience is an important topic relating to contemporary tensions in public life. While contemporary accounts typically characterize conscience as a faculty, I suggest that this imports a subjective immediacy that risks curtailing public reasoning and deliberation while fostering ‘partisan epistemologies’.
My paper casts new light on current challenges facing democratic conceptions of citizenship vis-à-vis conscientious disagreement by exploring Augustine’s account of conscience—situated within late antique notions of conscientia as a virtuous practice of moral self-awareness—to enrich contemporary reflection. While Augustine affirms conscience’s interiority, he does not understand it as a faculty to be immediately followed but something fallibly formed by socio-cultural norms and warped by sin (conf. 3.8.15-16). I then explore how Augustine offers distinctive resources for contemporary tensions by re-envisioning conscience as a virtuous personal and civic practice that fosters public reasoning, resists epistemic self-enclosure, and provides resources for enduring and transforming disagreement.
Augustine of Hippo wrote extended reflections on spectacles throughout his career. Confessions and City of God offer timeless insights about how spectacles shape the public and arouse the passions of its spectators. This paper argues spectacles of antiblack violence arouse the passion of bloodlust and inebriate its spectators with bloodthirsty pleasure. This paper offers a close reading of gladiatorial spectacles in Book VI of Confessions. After parsing out the implications of Augustine’s analysis, the essay engages a Foucauldian analysis of spectacles of racial violence and the libidinal economies they produce. Then the paper considers the similarities between the gladiatorial spectacle as described by Augustine and the lynching spectacle as described by James Cone and W.E.B. Du Bois. Drawing on William Cavanaugh and Rowan Williams the paper concludes that spectacles of antiblack violence are idolatrous anti-liturgies which arouse passions like bloodlust and bloodthirsty pleasure.