O’Donovans, Oliver and Joan Lockwood. Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics Past and Present. Eerdmans, 2007.
I’ve read this book more than any other book over the past eleven years. Each essays is a Master’s course in social ethics. With all the combined essays, you will know more about ethics than the average seminary graduate. This post is going to be very long, but given the contents, that is unavoidable.
The most important essay, and the one from which most others spring, is Oliver O’Donovan’s essay on Augustine’s City of God 19.4. O’Donovan is in the very dangerous waters of whether the City of Man constitutes a true res publica. And if it doesn’t, and if the Church does, does this mean that the Church is actually the only true political society? If so, we aren’t that far from Yoder. But I don’t think O’Donovan takes it in that direction.
Some background terms: A thing’s end is its perfection. The summum bonum is that object for which other objects are sought, but which is sought only for itself.
- each city has its own end.
- Augustine is not saying that the two cities get along together by having a common use of means towards different ends. The connective phrase ita etiam connects chapter 16 with the first line of chapter 17: the comparison is between the earthly city and the earthly household
Consensus of Wills
But what of the obvious fact that the Two Cities do seem to “get along” from time to time? For one, we note that members of the heavenly city use the earthly as a means to an end; whereas the earthly city sees itself as an end. There is no tertium quid between the two cities, no neutral space. The agreement can only be on a surface level of means, and only that.
Ius and Iustitia
Augustine notes that “ius” flows from the source of iustitia (19.21). There can be no iustitia common to the two cities because the earthly city does not deal or participate in the forgiveness of sins (Ep. 140.72; Spirit and the Letter 32.56). Iustitia, nonetheless, is not at the forefront of Augustine’s concerns.
If a state does display some virtues but it relates to some object other than God, then it is disorder (19.14-16). This insight allows Augustine to say that there is some relative order and good in a state, but gives him the space to critique the State. (Interestingly, Augustine has no vision for political programs; sorry, Reconstructionists).
O’Donovan then outlines a pyramid of ascending orders of peace in the universe (rerum omnium). I will number them but I can’t reproduce the pyramidal scheme here. The numbers aren’t of greater importance to lesser, or vice-versa. Rather, beginning with (1) it is a continual movement outward.
(10) ?
(9) peace of the heavenly city
(8) peace of the city
(7) peace of the household (19.14-16)
(6) pax hominum (Peace of Rome? or basic Peace between men)
(5) peace with God
(4) Body-soul union
(3) rational soul
(2) irrational passions
(1) Body
The relation between peace and order is one of definition. The peace of any household is the tranquility of order.
Household (Domus)
It is an ordered harmony of giving and receiving commands. Unlike the City, though, the commands are not given from a desire to dominate, but from compassionate acceptance of responsibility. Augustine does not try to “transform” society. It is impossible to read Book 19 or the whole City of God that way. Rather, he “transvalues” society’s structures (O’Donovan 68).
The Proprietary Subject and the Crisis of Liberal Rights
Key point: The possession of rights is always proprietorship; all natural rights (for the West) originate in property rights (Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, 75). This originated with Pope John XXIII (1329 AD). He saw man as created with full lordship and ownership as possession (dominum). His point was to discredit Fransiscan theologians who insisted on radical poverty.
This is the rights culture that would spring full-bloom in the modern world. The problem it created was how to have community if the above take on rights is true.
Patristic Foundations of Non-Proprietary Community
The fathers thought men should share as an imitation of God’s sharing his goodness with us.Augustine’s AchievementAugustine distinguished between two objective rights: (a) divine right, by which all things belong to the righteous, and (b) human right, in which is the jurisdiction of earthly kings (79, quoting Epistle 93).
- Justice for Augustine is a rightly-ordered love seen in the body politic, which would mean men loving the highest and truest good, God, for God’s sake.
- Therefore, the bonum commune is a sharing in a rightly-ordered love (City of God, BK 19.21).
- Because this sharing is spiritual, it is common and inclusive. Thus we have a republic in the truest sense of the word: res publica, public things.
- Conversely, a disordered love in the soul is the privatization of the good.
- Therefore, a disordered love will see the destruction of community.
O’Donovan comments,It is the regulated interaction of private spheres of degenerate freedom, secured by the protection of property and enhanced by the provision of material benefits at the hands of unscrupulous tyrants (80).
Fransiscan Poverty: The Evangelical Theology of Non-Possession
- Renouncing property right means that the viator is not a self-possessor, but rather is possessed by Christ and receives his powers (85).
Wyclif’s Ecclesiological Revolution
Irony: Wyclif’s reform program actually owed a great deal to Pope John XXIII’s reflections.
- Non-proprietary posession belonged not only to Adam’s original state, but all the way forward to the episcopolate today: this should be seen in the church militant (88).
- Divine lordship (dominum): per Wyclif’s predecessor, Fitzralph, God is the primary possessor and enjoyer of creation. Therefore, his giving of creation to Adam is a communication and sharing of himself, rather than a transfer of Lordship (89).
- For the church, for Wyclif, this is God’s gift of himself as the love of Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13).
- Therefore, all of the “justified,” who coexist with Christ’s love, share (communicant) in this lordship directly from Christ.
- Therefore, just dominion involves rightly-ordered love towards these communicable goods, which in turn depends on true knowledge of them available in Christ.
Medieval Theories on Usury
medieval economics: A Christo-centric ethic of perfection that drew heavily upon the Stoic-Platonist tradition.
- drew upon the Patristic vision of polarity of opposing loves of spiritual and earthly riches, “viewed avarice as the root of all evil,” property right as morally tainted (Lockwood O’Donovan, 99).
- Not fully Aristotelian, though. The Patristic vision viewed community primarily in terms of a common participation in invisible goods and a charitable sharing of divisible goods by its members.
Canonical Development of the Usury Prohibition
The church recognized two intrinsic titles to interest (indemnity) on loans in the case of delayed repayment: the title of damages sustained and that of profit foregone. Further, contracts are distinguished from loans.
- The locatio: a rental contract on a piece of property
- The societas: partnership where profit and risk were shared
- The Census: sale or purchase for life of a rent-charge (the return varied on the productivity)
The church in fact gave moral license to limited opportunities for investment and credit that favored the welfare of the poor but did not serve an expanding commercial economy (101-102). However, as contracts became more complex over time, it was really hard to not engage in some form of usury.
The Earlier Medieval Treatments of Usury
God’s original will for human community:
- its members make common use of the goods of creation to relieve material want (104).
- air, sun, rain, sea, seasons (divinely created as koinonia, unable to be monopolized; cf. modern American government attacking those who store rainwater)
- Gratian argues this did not mean private ownership and amassing wealth. It’s hard to see how this squares with Proverbs injunction that a godly man leaves an inheritance. And if the wealth is to be distributed by the church, it’s hard to see how the church can make any claim to poverty and non-possessorship.
The usurer sells time: time originally belongs to God, and secondarily belongs to all creatures. Thus, to sell time is to injure all. Further, time is a koinon, indivisibly shared by all creatures.
Roman contract of loan (mutuum): a fungible good is transferred from owner to borrower. Ownership is transferred because the borrower is not expected to repay the exact same item. The borrower assumes the risk of loss and is bound to repay it. Thefore, Lockwood O’Donovan argues, “The medieval theologians and canonists could argue, in the first place, that the usurer charges the debtor for what the debtor already owns” (107).
The Thomistic Treatment of Usury
Commutative justice (ST 2a2ae. 78)
Usury sins against justice in the exchange, a violation against equality in the exchange
Thomas does presuppose property right
- sterility of money theory
- Money is a means of measuring equivalence in an exchange. It can only establish equivalence if it is formally equal to the thing itself in exchange (
- the usurer inflicts on the needy borrower a moral violence of making him repay more than he was lent.
- Thomas also argues that human industry, not money is the cause of profit.
- to charge separately for a thing
Problems with Barth’s Political Ethics
For Ramsey, God accepts Christ’s regnant new humanity. For Barth, God rejects the old humanity. This seems to mean that God also rejects extra-ecclesial orders as such. When Barth comes to war as such, he does not interact with Just War reasoning but simply lists the evils of the Second World War.
Ramsey can point to “monuments of grace” in such a horror, even to legitimate uses of State force. Barth can only suggest a delaying action (CD III/4, p. 456). As a result, notes O’Donovan, Barth “ends up precisely in the place he intended to bypass, in a politics that can only be viewed soberly and not with evangelical faith or hope” (O’Donovan 264).
A Way Forward With Ramsey
Ramsey has what Barth needs: a way to bridge the gap between homo politicus which is redeemed in Christ and homo politicus that is in need of redemption. We are back with the distinction between esse and bene esse. The latter terms also suggests something along the lines of goal or end. Ramsey is speaking of true political activity.
Is Barth an Apollinarian?
Ramsey offers a model in which political power is both used appropriately and judged: the Incarnation, homo assumptus. This means that Christ takes on the fallen order, including homo politicus. There is no radical “Other” realm to which Christ has no access. As O’Donovan notes, “Only so can the homo politicus that is redeemed be the same homo politicus that was in need of redemption” (266).
Barth will not grant this. But in not granting it, he is partitioning off a section of man’s redemption. To be fair, Barth resists this temptation in Christology but not in politics.
Who is Ramsey’s “Liberal?”
A liberal for Ramsey is one who splits politics and military doctrine.
Liberalism for O’Donovan: the inadequacy of every human attempt to render justice. A magistrate’s power should be limited. Therefore, power is suspect but necessary (270).
What does Ramsey mean by Just War and International Politics? So, O’Donovan: “The international sphere was a constitutional vacuum, but by no means a moral or political vacuum” 271). Ramsey suspects there is a continuum that links violent with nonviolent resistance. Indeed, is not democracy justum bellum (Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, 126)? Jesus never said to resist evil by ballot boxes.
A Patriot King 