Arendt and Augustine: A Pedagogy of Desiring and Thinking for Politics. By MarkAloysius. London and New York: Routledge, 2024. Pp. xiv, 202. 190. 00.

Augustine had a horror of cycles and the cyclic view of life, where the game is to seek out one mindless thing after another and then repeat. At the end of the Soliloquies (sol. 2.19.36)—the most famous of his Cassiciacum writings—he admits as much in a dialogue that has been going on between a blandly Platonised personification of reason and his own crumbling but still curious interiority. It is from the vantage of his crumbling persona, seeking and insecure, that he manages to discover a surprisingly basic fear: not the oblivion of death and the loss of even loss itself, but the deeper madness of a wisdom that reboots to infancy once the wisdom-seeker has managed something akin to perfect self-possession. (Think here, as no doubt Augustine did, of book 6 of Virgil's Aeneid, the part where Anchises explains to his son, the persona of all things Roman, that purified souls, while still ensconced in blessed fields pagan Eden, invariably drink in forgetfulness and crave rebirth.) In response to the terrifying spectacle of a wisdom that sides against itself, Augustine's reason (ratio) offers him the lame reassurance of a postmortem delight: that of a heavenly life relieved of the heaviness of flesh and yet sufficiently substantial to fend off the siren song of the earth. Readers of Hannah Arendt—theorist of world-weary authoritarianism and the banality of evil—know from her that Augustine fields a far better alternative to a dispirited cosmology than a retreat to dogmatic otherworldliness. But one has to leave the orbit of the Soliloquies well behind to get to where we will find an Augustine—call him Arendt's Augustine—lending prodigious political intelligence to an inventive theology of creation. Think of it: a self-sufficient creator adds humanity to a process of differentiation that up to that point had been going rather well: light from darkness, land from sea, plenty of biodiversity. All good. So why add humans to the mix? Why bargain with chaos? Arendt points us in the direction of the political theologian, the Augustine who writes at more than a stone's throw remove from worldly perfectionism and the drive for unsurpassable, albeit not very mutual, glory. This Augustine at least gets the cardinal idea of politics right: that politics is nothing less (and perhaps nothing more) than a state of being, inter homines esse, a state, as it were, of human amongness. And, one might add, only slightly paradoxically, that when we are all truly among one another, we human beings are naturally quite different. Arendt never tires of the wisdom of Augustinian novelty. She calls such novelty, ‘natality’, and natality—the vital excess of the once born—is the root notion of her own political wisdom. Arendt finds her touchstone for natality, which Augustine has no specific word for, deep within the City of God (civ. 12.20), where he pushes back against the idylls of eternal recurrence and memorably writes: ‘In order for a beginning to be, the human being was made, before whom there was no one’. (The Latin word for beginning is ‘initium’, and here beginning carries the connotation of something sacred, an initiation into being.) It is not lost on Mark Aloysius that Augustine's best political offering to the resolutely secular Arendt is steeped in theological, and indeed mystagogical, commitment. For Augustine there is just no getting around the mystery that binds us together apart from an enforced oneness that opens up politics to (non-monstrous) sanctification. In Arendt and Augustine, Aloysius continually gestures to a mystagogy that speaks more to initiatory rites and pedagogical practices than it does to a mysticism that sows isolation and ultimately leaves us to feel our feelings alone. The idea of a beneficent mystery that would both elicit a pedagogy and draw forth a people suggests the possibility, if not the promise, of an elevated politics. But where there is promise, there is also the spectre of declension. Aloysius begins his book reflecting on his time as a Jesuit working to counsel and console Malaysians whose immigration status had rendered them harum (unholy). Here, state power creates the very evil of statelessness. (No wonder Arendt is his go-to political theorist.) Aloysius ends his book resolving to turn to his attention to the presence of abuse in the Church and the kind of ecclesiology that sustains it. His words here are his book's cri de coeur (p. 192): ‘Far too much of the pedagogy in the church prepares Christians merely for sacramental worship but not for the sanctification of the secular as citizens. Far too little attention is given to the violence that is inherit in a certain vision of ecclesiology and in the practices that preclude difference’. Arendt and Augustine is a densely argued text consisting of a preface, an introduction, seven analytically constructed chapters well set up for cross-referencing, and a conclusion that ably recapitulates the main stops along the way of the book's argumentative trajectory. Given the complexity of the trip and the fact that comparative study tends, in itself, to be underdetermined (comparison is question-begging if done just for comparison's sake), it is reasonable to pause on the question of destination. Where are we going on this trip? Since Arendt is known to be both an influential and an inventive interpreter of Augustine, we might fairly expect from Aloysius a carefully considered take on whether Arendt, all things considered, gets Augustine right. And we do in fact get traction on the matter of that seductively naïve rightness from Arendt and Augustine—to an extent. Early into what Aloysius calls ‘her Augustinian odyssey’ (p. 183), Arendt has a tendency to attribute to Augustine a fairly totalising notion of otherworldliness which, upon analysis, comes to little more than world-denial and a perverse embrace of homelessness. In her dissertation on Augustine's love-concept—Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin—she bequeaths to Augustine and his heirs this burning question: ‘Why should we make a desert out of the world?’ Well, we shouldn’t, I would say, as one of those heirs. But even Arendt comes to see, albeit towards the end of her odyssey (see volume 2 of The Life of the Mind), that deserts too are places of life and new beginnings, and fall within a worldliness that Augustine has no particular reason to deny. As Aloysius makes clear, Augustine does not deny what he has no particular reason to deny. He is not the genius who discerns the essence of the political only to turn his back on all of its worldly possibilities. Here, instead, we have a wonder to behold. Arendt and Augustine, the political theorist and the patristic theologian, till the same ground. But not so fast. It is not the aim of Arendt and Augustine to advance the very academic thesis that Arendt is more Augustinian than she or you or I would imagine. I’m not sure, in any case, who would find such a thesis reassuring. Do we already have a rich enough concept of politics to be able intelligibly to add mystagogy to Arendt's love of the world and natality to Augustine's sojourn with the heavenly city? Aloysius labours in the field of conceptual analysis because he wisely recognises that our politics remains fractured along the lines of an incoherent worldliness. We appeal to selves as if they were worlds apart and then, being clumsy self-lovers, we are compelled to bow before a prophetic loneliness that whispers of another world. World as home, self as world. This is the sort of incoherence that relegates the political theorist and the patristic theologian to sequestered spaces. But for Aloysius it was never about making one thinker's thoughts fit within the compass of another's. We aren’t whole because our Arendt can be made out to think Augustine's thoughts, or vice versa; we are whole when the differences that animate thinking are no longer so rending. Aloysius puts the point well (p. 158): ‘The ability to be at home with one's own thoughts and to think from the standpoint of another, both of which require withdrawal from the world into the solitude of thought, is important in curtailing evil and is thus a safeguard of ethical life.’ Arendt and Augustine is clearly a worthy addition to the Routledge series, Transforming Political Theologies, under the series editorship of Judith Gruber, Vicent Lloyd, and David True. The only part that gives me pause is Aloysius's tendency to treat Arendt as the more aporetic figure. Augustine gets his needed dose of this-worldliness from Arendt, but Arendt has to turn to Augustine—to Augustinian mystagogy—to be rid of her aporias. As things are set up, it is conceptually more complex to bring mystagogy to Arendt than it is to bring natality to Augustine. Such a predisposition may not matter much in the long run. But as Aloysius settles into the notion of a sanctified politics, I suspect it will. 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