Last week I traveled to the South Bend area for an event. On the flight from DC I browsed a little-known book of collected essays titled “I Call You Friends: John Cavadini and the Vision of Catholic Leadership for Higher Education”, which celebrates the work of John Cavadini, Professor of Theology and long-time Director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life. The very last essay in the volume captivated me. It was significant enough for me to write the appropriate people and request permission to republish it here, so that it might become more widely known. While the author is writing about ‘eschatological vision’ for what is primarily a Catholic audience, I believe anyone with an interest in the relationship between religious belief and politics will find it interesting.
So it was with special permission that I am very pleased to be able to share this paper titled “Eschatological Vision: Between Compromise and Intransigence”, by Francesca Aran Murphy.
In this paper, I contend that the only attribute that can rescue a Catholic from intransigence or compromise in political affairs is eschatological vision. I begin by sketching what I mean by ‘political matters.’ Political affairs do not only happen in Washington, D.C. or at the Palace of Westminster. As we know, they can take place in Florida and Tennessee and all over America. Politics is what happens whenever people argue about how to direct and govern a social organization, whether it is a business or a university or a local club. All those who make their living by teaching belong to professional associations. These associations likewise have their politics, their donkeys, their dissidents, and their leaders.
It seems much better to set one’s sights by speaking about the ‘office politics’ known to all who work, because it gives us a focus on what can actually be achieved. The more purely ‘political’ and abstract our conception of politics is, the more unrealistic our expectations of what can be gained through it. People speak of political goals for their country that they would never dream of putting on the agenda for a meeting of their own co-workers.
Political leadership is where people give a steer to social organizations, small or great. And it’s best to imagine forms of political leadership in which professors and teachers could actually be involved. We could all be local leaders, of some kind, so long, it seems as we don’t try to make catastrophically heavy weather out of it. But then we may wonder how the prospective be leaders within a university faculty or of a women’s choir are supposed to be endowed with ‘eschatological vision.’
How could Catholics possibly get involved in local let alone national politics if they lumber themselves with an eschatological vision? Is the advocacy of an ‘eschatological vision’ a sleight of hand intended surreptitiously to seduce Catholics into political quietism? Surely the only way to ensure that the light of truth is out from under the bushel, and that there is leaven in the loaf, and plenty of salt too, is to train Catholics for leadership in politics great and small? Wouldn’t we rather that political affairs have Catholic leaders than any other kind?
Alas, though, one would really rather not: it is a sound and historically well-informed principle that antics of Catholics in the public square are an embarrassment to their co-religionists. By and large, therefore, Catholics who know a bit of history would greatly prefer not have to observe their co-religionists in the public square. For they commonly make obstreperous fools of themselves, and sometimes collude to play the knave into the bargain. When it comes to politics, the two great temptations into which Catholics rush like Gadarene swine are compromise and intransigence.
Compromise and intransigence are the commonest Catholic reactions to our political condition, which is most often one that could be labelled ‘occupation.’ More often than not, politics for us takes place within institutions or realms that have been conquered and occupied by alien powers. Mostly, not always, but by and large, we Christians live in occupied territory. The Babylonian captivity was not just one of the series of political disasters that befell ancient Israel, but, more than that, it is a working parable for many of the situations in which we operate our political strategems.
Another, more optimistic way of putting this is to say that, beyond the Church itself, Catholics cannot hope to form ‘Christendom clubs,’ or ‘Christendom Universities,’ or ‘Christendom States or Countries.’ Even where the Church is established by law, it will fight constantly, and we hope, valiantly, to preserve its identity, and constantly find itself a ‘prisoner’ or a ‘captive’ of powerful, worldly interests. For a small example, the Church is, as it were, the legal establishment in any Catholic educational institution, and most people who teach in Catholic schools and colleges would say that it is a daily fight to contain the operations of worldly captains of State. Beyond the Church, with its own laws and character, there is here below no ‘nation’ or city that can be characterized purely and simply as ‘Godly’ or ‘God-bound.’ Catholics, some of them statesmen, operate outside their own territory, and have no turf to call their own.
When he called Christians ‘resident aliens,’ Stanley Hauerwas was giving an optimistic, American version of the thesis of Augustine about the political Babylonian captivity of pilgrim earthlings. Cain founded the City of Man and Abel, in his short stay on earth, established the City of God, and “Scripture tells us that Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes.”[1] The ‘City of God’ has many citizens, here below, but no city to call its own. They are God-bound travelers. These pilgrims are not landlubbers but sailors. The ‘ark’ of Noah is one of their symbols, because a boat is not a stable, rooted and motionless domicile, but merely a vessel for a journey.[2]
The Catholic Compromiser and Intransigent both kick against the pricks of occupancy. The Compromiser thinks shrewdly to outwit the occupying powers by pretending to go along with him. He puts on such a good show of pretending to go along with the enemy that its actually very difficult to tell if he’s left off pretending. For Catholics, compromise in political leadership is making the best of a bad job, whilst entertaining the delusion that one is adding the salt of virtue to people and situations that are invincibly armored against salt or leaven or all the rest. One large scale example of compromise is the ‘Vichy’ bargain struck by Marshall Petain in 1941. ‘Vichy’ has become a common-place metaphor for collusion, and with some justice. The ‘Vichy’ compromise rests on the illusion that foreign occupation by alien powers can be ameliorated and even swung round to support some good causes, if only some sound men, like one’s own team, are there to collude with the devils. A smaller scale example, closer to home, is the way in which our managerialist culture has begotten armies of administrators, who have over-run our universities and distorted their operation and ends.
People get into the game of collusion when we tell ourselves that this or that ‘board’ or directorate sets bad goals for an institution, but at least if we are on it, there will be one sound Catholic there to lead the opposition. Someone has to get onto the board, to represent the counter-position. It’s the temptation of power, covering itself up with the illusion of having a good influence on people who are in fact soon to influence and corrupt us, and not vice versa. Catholics are led into such situations of political compromise by trying to find ‘common ground’ with bad political protagonists who despise our faith. Our Babylonian overlords want more than anything else gently to compel us to treat our faith as if it were extrinsic to our actual political aims and purposes. Our faith can never be entirely outside of our political aims, though these ends may touch the faith only indirectly and tangentially.
The brigade of Catholic political Intransigents is better known to us, because many of them have been theologians of one kind or another. The Intransigent is the man of principle with the impossible plan, the plan that it is politically impossible to implement. The Intransigent will brook no compromise, and broker no deals with their opponents and overlords. Noah Rothman has written an entertaining study of intransigency in contemporary American politics, noting that both progressivists and conservatives have lately succumbed to political fatalism, as a result of ‘unrealistic expectations.’ Imagining that ‘change should happen because we will it,’ can only lead to despair and a ‘weakness for extremism,’ which is another way of saying, a weakness for giving up on political process.[3] For Christians, the political process consists in negotiating with, out-maneuvering, and outwitting the Babylonian conquerors.
The intransigents have done more in the past half century to betray Catholic schools and universities than all of the compromisers and all of the non-believers combined. For they simply cannot put their hands to working with the actually existing people in the actually existing political situations in which they find themselves. Repeatedly the Intransigent captain sinks his own little ship of state, scuttling and capsizing the little boat—it seems too damnable to him to be worth bailing out. The Intransigent can always think of a better ship of state than the one he is in, which is OK, except for that no craft would be better without the faith to steer her home, in the dark, by the stars. Casting themselves as angels of light, they cannot focus a charitable eye upon their peers and co-workers. They cannot extract the moat in their brother’s lens because of the beam in their own eye, certainly, but they also cannot see the beams of light in their weaker brethren for the dust storm that rages around their own heads. Thousands upon thousands of idea particles whirl around the Intransigent’s head, a perfect perichoretic swarm of specks, motes and plain dust, which renders it impossible for the Intransigent to use a situation to Catholic and Christian advantage, to trade horses with his opponents, or to cooperate peacefully in the pursuit of common aims.
Neither the Compromiser nor his bed-fellow the Intransigent can succeed in political engagement, neither can bring the Gospel to bear in the public square, because neither Obdurate nor Pragmatist can imagine their political society as a ‘corpus mixtum,’ a body of people in which good and evil are inextricably mixed together, or at least mixed so thoroughly that only a harvesting angel out of the Book of Revelation could extricate the one from the other. This sounds counter-intuitive, because the zealous Intransigent may be a bit of a civic dualist and a political Manichee, but the Compromiser seems born to lead some ‘Corpus mixtum,’ in which, as Saint Augustine interprets our Lord’s parable, the wheat and the tares are tangled up like spaghetti until the end of time.[4]
Augustine presents the ‘corpus mixtum’ idea early in the City of God. It pops up in the first book already, where Augustine claims that,
[EXT][The Church] must bear in mind that among these very enemies are hidden her future citizens; and when confronted with them she must not think it a fruitless task to bear with their hostility until she finds them confessing the faith. In the same way, while the City of God is on pilgrimage in this world, she has in her midst some who are united with her in participation in the sacraments, but who will not join with her in the eternal destiny of the saints. … At one time they join his enemies in filling the theatres, at another they join with us in filling the churches. But, such as they are, we have less right to despair of the reformation of some of them, when some predestined friends, as yet unknown even to themselves, are concealed among our most open enemies. In this, those two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgement.[5][/EXT]
Augustine is never more uncompromising, never more judgmental, never more the partially-reformed Manichean, never more prophetic, than when he writes of about the ‘corpus mixtum.’ It takes the most eschatological perspective to imagine a political society as the intermingling of two citizenries, two opposed armies, one headed to perdition and the other destined for eternal paradise. To see your own society, your own university or club, or business, as a ‘corpus mixtum,’ one must, in imagination, stand posed above it in space and in time, and see it, as from a spaceship, or as Saint John the Divine saw human history swirling to its end from a vantage point in ‘eschatological time.’ It takes a purely eschatological perspective to see one’s own civic world as peopled by demonic opponents, some of whom are predestined to conversion into allies, and by seeming soul mates, some of whom are false friends indeed. Only an eschatological vision can make one see, on the one hand, that some of one’s colleagues are citizens of Babylon, and some of the heavenly Jerusalem. The gift of the perception of radical evil and radical good in the ordinary human beings around us, and both of them mixed and intermingled, is the eschatological vision. And this judgmental, shrewd vision is what it takes to exercise successful Catholic political leadership, in matters great and small.
The Christian statesman is the Eschatological Statesman. In matters small and great, the Eschatological Statesman is a descendant of the hirsute prophets of the Old Testament. It is perhaps not quite true that John the Baptist is the last of the line of Old Testament prophecy, for the eschatological statesmen continue to declare with stony, pitiless eyes that the ‘axe is laid to the root.’ Charitable to a fault in reckoning with individual men and women, the Christian leader who has inherited prophetic blood loathes to yield an inch on matters of principle. Prophetic blood is like Flannery O’Connor’s ‘wise blood’ in this, that it engenders an instinctual and unerring feel for the weight and balance of situations. The Christian statesman can smell a rat, and an opportunity, and a threat.
This is not to say that he can always gauge, in practical terms, the gravity of the threat: like his biblical forebears he consistently exaggerates the dangers, and foresees bleak devastation and the coming of the Lord’s Day in setbacks too paltry to make the secular history books. The Eschatological Statesman seldom chills, in matters of state, and never lets things pass, or imagines he can muddle through. He knows that he and his fellow citizens of the new Jerusalem are never in less than mortal danger of being wasted by the enemy. So he seldom chooses his battles with caution aforethought.
He often has to be talked down from the ledge by the cabinet of donkeys and dissidents no prophet can do without. The Eschatological Statesman sees storm clouds brewing under the bluest and most apparently innocent skies.
And this is how this Noah keeps the ship of state afloat: he violently over-estimates every peril, and for that very reason he fights with every last breath for the survival of his ark. While the bystanders looked on mockingly, in broad daylight and sunshine, Noah had built that ark; with not a cloud in the sky he hacked down trees and sawed planks, and hammered and poured on pitch; on the sunniest spring day he drove his protesting wife, with Shem, Ham and Japheth in tow, and their little ones, and all the livestock he could collect, up the wooden drawbridge and into the ark of safety. How they laughed, those bystanders who were soon to drown in the flood. How they cried as the Lord God unleashed thunder, tempests and downpour from the skies.
Like the Intransigent, no less, Noah had a crazy, utopian plan; but unlike the political incompetent, the eschatological captain of state sweated, and toiled with hopeful craftsmanship to make his crazy idea a reality. In the mid-summer sun he wanted to build a ship to rescue a remnant of humanity and a good spread of animals from an imminent, cosmic disaster movie; driven by vast waves in his little wooden tub, with the flood gates of heaven opening upon him, Noah the just man, the man of faith, still aimed to rescue his remnant from the deathly waves.
Even the mature, episcopal Augustine was a little impatient with this childish, nautical turn in the Genesis narrative, urging that “only a love of disputation would allow anyone to contend that the elaborate details of the historical narrative are not symbols designed to give a prophetic picture of the Church.”[6] The elaborate details about the construction of the Ark are surely there, in part, to show the reader that Noah, both as ship-wright and as involuntary sailor, carries out God’s command meticulously and with ridiculous exactitude, as a just man, who is absolutely determined to rescue his tiny, querulous remnant. He does not rescue his remnant because they are likeable, and certainly not because they are righteous people like him. Long before Augustine allegorized his sea voyage, Noah saw and smelt, that “the clean and the unclean are contained” in the “unity” of the Ark.[7]
Christian, eschatological statesmanship is a kind of mean between collaboration and intransigence, though not a split down the middle, rationalist kind of mean, but rather a charismatic, baptized in the Spirit and in fire, kind of Aristotelian mean. Eschatological statesmanship does not simply ‘drive down the middle of the road’ between lukewarm pragmatism and meretricious dedication to true but irrelevant principles. It is a mean, but can be seen as synthesizing the virtues of both extremes only from high above both, from the eschatological, biblical perspective. Like the dystopian statesmanship of the compromisers, but more genuinely, it hopes and takes care to include all, clean and unclean, or as many as can be squeezed into the Ark. Like the utopian statesmanship of the intransigents, it is a stickler for principles, only, in this case, for principles that matter and can be applied in this historical situation.
Where it differs most sharply from the world-weary, yet worldly, pragmatist and the unworldly, but not very supernatural zealot, is that the Christian, eschatological vision of politics, great and small, is not based on morality. When our Lord drove the merchants out of the temple, it was not with a moral yardstick. Our Lord’s righteous anger was fueled by the degeneration of Jerusalem’s house of worship into a market. It was not a matter of moral disapproval of salesmanship, but of eschatological condemnation of the perversion of the Temple worship by the very implements of sacrificial worship, the animals. It was not a mere moral disapproval of the financial transactions, the coin-exchange and sale of pigeons and lambs, but a prophetic denunciation of the denaturing of the house of prayer, worship and sacrifice by the very means of worship. The crime was not moral but religious, the turning of worship from service to God to service of human appetite. It was the re-orientation of heaven bound gifts into merchandise that provoked the wrath of God.
Likewise, Augustine’s vision of the two branches of humanity, “those who live by human standards” and “those who live by God’s will” is not based on mere moral disapproval of the human society which is “doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the devil” or moral approval of those “predestined to reign with God for all eternity.”[8] Augustine’s vision of history as the two, entangled paths of the City of Man and the City of God is not a moralizing vision, but a biblical, prophetic vision of history, a meta-historical extension of a reading of the biblical narrative into the whole of human civilization. From Paleolithic Cain and Abel until the end of time, the City of Man and the City of God will forge their spiraling, paths, writing variants on the same human story over and over again. The moralizing Compromiser or Intransigent thinks of Cain’s City first and foremost as immoral. But it seeks its own goods; it is not sound political strategy to conceive of political disagreements as conflicts between moral rectitude and absence of morality. They are religious disagreements.
The citizens of the worldly city worship that very city as their mirror image. The political motto of that city is Lenin’s ‘who whom?’, who is doing what to whom? Since the citizens of the heavenly city worship not themselves but another, it is not surprising that their political leaders conceive their task not as self-aggrandizement but as service to others. How will compromisers and intransigents offer genuine service to the common good? Eschatological faith is given to only a few of us, but all of can serve in our local public squares. The eschatological leader will press-gang into his service those folks who, by themselves, are politically rudderless: the compromisers become his donkeys, and the intransigents make very useful dissidents under the guidance of a good strategical thinker. He cannot function without a war cabinet of such folks, who here prove their worth. The eschatological leader is not always a saint, or, at least, he is like nearly every saint, and has the vices of his virtues. It can scarcely be denied that, so single-minded is he, so absorbed is he in his task of service, and so determined that others, too, shall serve the ends of the City, that every one of his social interactions is oriented toward furthering the good of the City. Every encounter is an encounter with the general, directing his troops here and there.
It seems as if, for Augustine himself, history is nothing more or less than the interplay of the two cities. He tells us that, “My task is to discuss…the rise, the development and the destined ends of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, the cities which we find interwoven in this present transitory world, and mingled with one another.”[9] Having set himself that task, he chronicles the adventures of man from Adam up to Theodosius, and thence down to the sacking of Rome by the Goths in 410 A.D. So it seems as if history emerges from the friction between the two cities. Why else are the two societies interwoven, except to produce some fruit or offspring?
That, at least, is Kant’s kind of creative misreading of this ancient Christian trope: it might be that when Kant claims that higher civilizations emerge out of conflict and war amongst men, he has some bodged, muddled memory of the ancient Christian trope of the two cities at the back of his mind. From Kant’s “creative mis-recollection”[10] of Augustine, then, arise the idea of some kind of ‘dialectic’ as the motor of history, that is, the idea that history, and higher and more sophisticated and even utopian human civilizations emerge out of the crucible of war.
But that is not exactly what Augustine had in mind. God’s original intention, he says, was the unity and fraternity of the human race. We may imagine that, for the proper interpretation of original sin to be possible, God had little alternative outside a monogenetic creation of the human race: unless God made humanity from a single man, God would have made it impossibly difficult for theologians to explain the universal extent of original sin. But no, according to Augustine’s reading of God’s mind on this point: “God chose to make a single individual the starting-point of all mankind, and that his purpose in this was that the human race should not merely be united in a society by natural likeness, but should be bound together by a kind of tie of kinship to form a harmonious unity, linked together by the ‘bond of peace’.”[11]
It was, as it seems, first the Fall and then the rescue, and the delivery of undeserved grace, to some of humanity, that drove the wedge between the two societies. For, under the impulse of grace, some elect to live “by the standard of the spirit”, whilst others capitulate to the law of death in their members, and live “by the standard of the flesh.”[12]
It follows, then, that, because the two societies live by different standards, each has its own idea of ‘peace.’ Peace is the cessation of purposeful motion, or coming to rest at the chosen end of one’s journey. For the denizens of the City of Man, peace is some kind of treaty between physical needs and physical appetites: the human city aims to find rest and peace in the fulfillment of appetite, or at least its cessation. When appetite ceases to itch and generate more physical needs, then an individual has his own worldly, humanistic peace. Peace for the individual member of the City of Man is the satiation of greed, through some kind of compromise between needs and appetites; and since the City of Man as a whole, in all its members, is driven by love of self, by self-will, so peace within the worldly city as a whole is a compromise between the lusting greedy wills of all the members. This is what Augustine calls the ‘peace of Babylon.’
Citizens of the ‘city above,’ the heavenly Jerusalem aim to come to rest, or peace, in a harmony between their own, obedient will and the will of God: the citizen of the New Jerusalem longs to say, with Dante, “in his will is our peace.”[13] Peace is the right relation between ourselves and God, who is unseen above, so peace is a matter of faith, not sight. So Augustine states that, “so long as he is in this mortal body,” the Jerusalemite passport holder, “is a pilgrim in a foreign land, away from God; therefore he walks by faith not by sight. That is why he views all peace, of body or of soul, or of both, in relation to that peace which exists between mortal man and immortal God, so that he may exhibit an ordered obedience in faith in subjection to the everlasting Law.”[14]
So in the City of Man, ‘peace’ is compromised between billions of ‘self-willing’ wills, whereas the peace of the New Jerusalem consists in faithfully binding one’s own will to the will of God. How surprising then to learn that “we,” we members of this New Jerusalem, “also make use of the peace of Babylon.”[15] It seems impossible to deny this without quixotic political irresponsibility. Augustine in his own time most likely was thinking of how the Gospel had spread through the pax Romana, and how very much the safety and the flourishing of Christians depended upon that worldly ‘pax.’ In our own time, we have only to look at what happens to the members of the Christian churches in the places where worldly, ‘Babylonian,’ civilization has broken down, as in parts of the Middle East, to see that we, too, must literally collude at the deepest level with the ‘earthly peace’ and with its values and aims. The development of civilization, it seems, is not the friction between the two cities, not their dialectic, but their ‘union,’ the re-union of all humanity in the embrace of the City of Man by the more wily City of God, which cannot survive on earth without its ugly brother. And it is this collusion, so it seems, which the Christian statesman must serve.
But it seems then that the Christian statesman must be a compromiser. In matters local and universal, he will have to negotiate with and harness the self-will, ambition and greed of the Babylonians in order to preserve the denizens of the City of God here below. We ‘pilgrims’ may have our eyes on the city above, the ‘heavenly city,’ but our survival on earth, so it seems, depends on collusion with the earthly city. ‘We also make use of the peace of Babylon’ is likely the mantra mumbled by the bean-counters as they trade the peace of God for a bit of human pax.
The Compromiser thinks to pay the price of the worldly peace so that he, and the weaker brethren, can enjoy the thought of the pious heavenly peace. This, he fondly believes, is rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. He knows that Saint Paul enjoins the Romans to “be subject unto the higher powers” (Rom 13.1) and that Augustine envisages the citizens of heaven as enslaved prisoners of the Emperor who “must needs make use of this peace also, until this mortal state, for which this kind of peace is essential, passes away. And therefore, it leads… a life of captivity in this earthly city as in a foreign land… and yet it does not hesitate to obey the laws of the earthly city.”[16]
But the compromising Catholic statesman, who makes his peace with Babylon, for the sake of the multitudes weaker brethren, of course, cannot actually make his compromise work. Where there is no vision, the peace perishes. The Compromiser is ultimately a dualist, like his confrere the Intransigent. He can see worldly peace, and pay a price for it, and he can see heavenly peace. He may know quite painfully, and realistically, how ugly the price of the Babylonian peace is, and what vices must be sown amongst the virtuous faithful in order to foster the bargain. The Compromiser is a realist, and knows precisely what lusts, rapacious appetites, and violences he tolerates so that his pilgrims can set their pious hearts on the heavenly city.
What he does not know how to do is to imagine, and so to create, what Augustine calls the ‘harmony’ between the two cities. Only the Eschatological Statesman will strike such a bargain that the treasures of the Pax Romana are brought into the new Jerusalem. For the Eschatological Statesman, by contrast, everything is caught up in the vision of the Heavenly Kingdom, and everything can be, at a stretch, related to it. The eschatological leader makes that stretch. He does not compromise and downplay the polarity between Babylon and Jerusalem, nor does he insist on their reciprocal repulsion. Rather than polarizing the two cities, he instantiates a creative polarity, or mobile analogy between the dynamic duo. Even the Babylonian peace can be imagined as an analogous relationship to the only genuine and authentic peace, in God. The Eschatological Statesman, with his prophetic faith and hopeful imagination, is the only politician who can orient the necessary and inevitable bargain with Babylon toward the true and authentic peace.
Babylon itself is Babylon: it cannot be ‘baptized’ or turned into the New Jerusalem. But its worldly kind of peace of balanced human wills can be envisaged as a relation, an orientation toward the heavenly peace of harmony between divine and human will. The immanent earthly peace is a relationship amongst human wills, each damping down its own lust to dominate power for the sake of peace, and likewise the transcendent, heavenly peace is the loving and obedient relationship of the human will to God. The Eschatological Statesman can orient the first, immanent relationship toward the higher, transcendent relation because he can imagine even this relation as an analogue of the harmony between God and man. This is because, to cite the same passage over, he “views all peace, of body or of soul, or of both, in relation to that peace which exists between mortal man and immortal God, so that he may exhibit an ordered obedience in faith in subjection to the everlasting law.”[17]
Francesca Aran Murphy is a Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame and the author of numerous books, including Christ the Form of Beauty (T & T Clark), God is Not a Story (OUP) and a theological commentary on I Samuel (Brazos). She is currently editing a series for Bloomsbury Academic called Illuminating Modernity.
This essay was used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com
[1] Augustine, City of God, XV.1. I use the 1972 edition of this text throughout.
[2] Ibid., XV.26.
[3] Rothman, “The Fatalist Conceit.”
[4] Augustine, City of God, XX.9.
[5] Ibid., X.35.
[6] Ibid., XV.27.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., XV.1.
[9] Ibid., XI.1.
[10] Cyril O’Regan has put this word into our urban dictionaries, with The Anatomy of Misremembering.
[11] Augustine, City of God, XIV.1.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, III.85.
[14] Augustine, City of God, XIX.14.
[15] Ibid., XIX.26.
[16] Ibid., XIX.17.
[17] Ibid., XIX.14.
Thanks for sharing, Luke! Both a challenging and insightful read.
Have you ever read or listened to Jonathan Sack's "On Creative Minorities" from his 2013 Erasmus Lecture series? It speaks, in a complementary way, to many of the same issues addressed by Professor Murphy, beginning with Jeremiah and the Babylonian Exile.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/01/on-creative-minorities
Powerful.