Loving Coercion

In a 1997 articles in the Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics , John Bowlin critiques the accounts of the “contradictions” or “tensions” between Augustine’s overall political theology and his advocacy of coercing Donatists into the church. Bowlin takes on RL Markus ( Saeculum ) and Milbank, who for different reasons think Augustine inconsistent at this point.

On Bowlin’s reading, Markus admired Augustine mainly for the “secular, pluralist, and autonomous politics that he finds in Augustine’s mature theology of the saeculum .” Coercing dissenters conflicts with these main themes. Over time Augustine abandoned the semi-Eusbian enthusiasm for the Christian empire, and also came gradually to abandon the notion of a tempora christiana , a distinct phase of “sacred history” within the new era after Christ. These earlier convictions would have supported a religiously coercive civil order, but Augustine abandoned these convictions without revising his views on coercion accordingly.

Bowlin doesn’t find this convincing.

First he challenges Markus’s attempt to enlist Augustine as an advocate for a kind of proto-liberalism: “When Augustine resists every effort to sacralize political life he is not providing a prescriptive account of politics, liberal or otherwise. He is not telling us what a legitimate political community looks like. He is not telling us what the limits of political authority should be. Rather, his intentions are strictly negative. God’s salvific purposes do not depend upon the fate of any earthly society, and therefore the goods that can be achieved within any political association outside of the city of God cannot be regarded as ultimate. They cannot be regarded as ends in themselves, at least not simply. Rather, the goods of political life and the mechanisms of political authority are mixed goods, neither strictly final ends nor merely instrumental means. They are proximate ends that are pursued and achieved, at least in part, so that they might be put to use for the sake of achieving those ends that are in fact regarded as final. Whether this or that final end is pursued with the assistance of the mixed goods of this or that political community largely depends upon the vicissitudes of political fortune. Indeed, it is this initial neutrality with respect to final ends, transformed as princes come and go, that is the consequence of Augustine’s desacralization of politics, not nascent liberalism.”

Markus rightly makes much of the political import of Augustine’s eschatology – his conviction that the world and the church remain mixed communities until the final separation of the two cities, and his recognition that there can be no final and absolute achievement of justice prior to the coming of the kingdom. But Bowlin thinks that Marks wrongly draws the inference that, this being true, “they should remain largely autonomous now.”

Bowlin responds at length: “the inference to autonomy in politics implies that God’s grace, which establishes membership in the heavenly city on its earthly sojourn, can have no concrete consequence for earthly politics. Augustine, I suggest, would have found this unthinkable. Indeed, there is ample evidence that he considered God’s grace diminishing the autonomy of politics through the efforts of Christian magistrates. In his letter to Apringius, proconsul of Africa, he concedes that Christian rulers must restrain the violent excesses of savage men, and yet they must do so ‘showing forth the mildness’ ( mansuétude ) of the church, ‘for whose sake and as whose son’ they act. Interrogations should proceed ‘without the use of hooks or fire.’ Punishments should be prudent and lenient, always displaying God’s mercy, never resorting to violence against life or limb (Ep. 134, v., Ep.33, 204). No doubt, politics transformed by grace remains politics. It remains concerned with the proximate ends of temporal life, it still operates with often tragic ignorance of human motivation and conduct (de civ.Dei, xix.6), and far too often it must resort to means of governance that elicit regret, if not remorse. Hooks and fire must be put aside, but the rod remains indispensable (Ep. 134; v., Ep.133.2). Yet Augustine is convinced that without an infusion of grace these ordinary realities of political life will be put to use for the sake of ends that fall short of the good and the just (de civ. Dei, xix.21, 24-25). It follows that politics for Augustine is never autonomous. It abhors a vacuum. If it is not transformed by grace, then more often than not it will be transformed by vice.”

I think the problem goes even deeper into Markus’s interpretation of Augustine. He makes a great deal of the shift in Augustine’s thinking in which he repudiates his earlier enthusiasm for the Christian empire. I take Markus’s word for it that there was a shift of some sort and degree (which is only natural – Augustine’s views becoming more measured and realistic with age), but the evidence he provides doesn’t indicate that he simple flattens, homogenizes, and secularizes Christian history. Markus cites Augustine’s comment on Psalm 72, for instance, where Augustine argues that the Psalm not only prophesies that kings bring their gifts to Christ consciously and deliberately but also that “kings . . . brought their gifts, without knowing what they were doing, in immolating the holy martyrs.” It’s a striking suggestion: Martyrs as sacrificial gifts of pagan kings. But Markus’s claim that “One could scarcely with for a clearer disavowal of his previous ‘prophetic’ interpretation of the tempora christiana ” overstates the point. It’s quite true that pagan persecutors were fulfilling prophecy when they offered the martyr-sacrifices; but it is not at all obvious from what Markus cites that Augustine would simply have equalized the persecuting kings with Christian kings. Markus doesn’t convince me that Augustine simply abandoned his earlier views of a continuing “sacred history,” and that does significant damage to Markus’s case for finding contradiction in Augustine’s views on government coercion.