Pride, Politics, and Humility in Augustine's City of God by Mary M. Keys (review)

Reviewed by: Pride, Politics, and Humility in Augustine's City of God by Mary M. Keys Thomas P. Harmon Pride, Politics, and Humility in Augustine's City of God by Mary M. Keys ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), xi + 253 pp. No one can doubt that the theme of pride and humility is crucial to understanding the thought of St. Augustine. Pride and humility loom large in studies of Augustine's thought on spirituality, the moral life, moral psychology, cognitional theory, and so on, as well as in the importance of the themes of pride and humility in Augustine's Confessions, his sermons, his commentary on Psalms, and others. But the themes of pride and humility have always seemed like something of an embarrassment when trying to grapple with Augustine's political thought. Christianity's critics—and Augustine's critics in particular, both ancient and modern—have oftentimes treated Augustine's elevation of humility and condemnation of pride as a weak spot to be exploited in attacking Augustine's approach to politics. It is a welcome development, therefore, to have Mary M. Keys's new book, Pride, Politics, and Humility in Augustine's City of God. Professor Keys fills a gap in two ways. First, she utilizes these two themes in order to offer an intelligent reading of the whole City of God. The City of God is a mammoth work, overwhelming even to those who study it as scholars. Everyone who has tried to teach it, especially while wearing the straightjacket of the semester-length course, knows that there needs to be a way to focus in order to teach the book responsibly. Keys has provided a very useful textbook for focusing on an inarguably important part of the whole book. Pride, Politics, and Humility will be a welcome aide for teachers guiding their students through the City of God. Second, she regards Augustine's treatment of pride and humility to be a strength rather than a weakness in articulating his thinking on politics. Keys goes to great lengths to show how detrimental pride is to the political—and human—good, and conversely, how much humility contributes to political and human flourishing. Far from being embarrassed about the two themes, Keys goes so far as to make them the centerpiece of her discussion of Augustine's political thought in his most political book and, further, to show in detail what riches Augustine opens up to the study and practice of politics thereby. Second, Keys uses the themes of pride and humility comprehensively and thoroughly to walk through the City of God—a task that, to my knowledge, has not yet been attempted in a book-length study. Keys summarizes her approach early on, presenting Augustine's argument that he seeks to defend a "virtuous humility" as distinguished from "counterfeits or mistaken iterations," and that, "paradoxically, a virtuous, ennobling form of this lowly quality does exist, and that it is wise to seek and cultivate End Page 687 it" (9). Prudently, Keys acknowledges that there are these counterfeits and mistaken iterations of humility, which would be neither ennobling nor virtuous. Keys similarly qualifies pride, calling the type of pride Augustine criticizes "vicious" (10). Just as humility ennobles and opens its cultivators to the truth, so pride leads to delusion and various types of evils and miseries. By so qualifying the types of pride and humility Augustine by turns blames and praises, Keys throws down the gauntlet to Augustine's critics that they need to address the realities Augustine actually spoke of instead of caricatures or straw men. Ultimately, Keys argues that Augustine's presentation of humility is inseparable from his Christology. "How then," Keys asks, "can we humans understand humility aright and cultivate it in our lives? Augustine's ultimate answer is a religious one: by learning to know and love Jesus Christ, in whose incarnation, life, and death the astounding and inspiring humility of God is fully revealed" (13). If Augustine's argument rests ultimately on theological principles and faith in Christ, what are the prospects for dialogue with those critics of Christianity Augustine seeks to address? Those grounds are not, perhaps, to be found in theological disputation, although...