James K.A. Smith Quote

But one of the dangers of eagerly diving in to the political sphere is that it tends to underestimate the strength of the currents already swirling around in that sphere. In other words, such Pylesque eagerness tends to think of politics just as a matter of strategy (and hence getting the right strategy in place), as something that we do, and underestimates the formative impact of political practices, that they do something to us.16 It is here that I think Augustine’s more nuanced analysis of the politics of the empire has something to teach us in the twenty-first century. Because he defines the political in terms of love, and because the formation of our loves is bound up with worship, Augustine is primed to recognize what we might call the liturgical power of political practices, which engenders critical nuance. As we noted in Augustine’s definition of a people (City of God 19.24), the earthly city’s different political configurations qualify as commonwealths, but they fail to be just because they are aimed at the wrong objects of love (that is, they wrongly constitute objects of love). So Augustine’s revised account of the empire yields a fundamentally critical evaluation, nothing like the rather rosy affirmation of the earthly city we tend to hear from those who (mistakenly) invoke Augustine as if he fathered the Holy Roman Empire.17 In this respect, Augustine’s liturgical analysis of the political enables him to be attentive to an antithesis that evangelical (Pylesque) enthusiasm for political activism seems to not recognize: that at stake in participation in the political configurations of the earthly city are matters of worship and religious identity. The public practices of the empire are not merely political or merely temporal; they are loaded, formative practices aimed at a telos that is ultimately antithetical to the city of God.