Realism in Love: Reading Augustine with Raymond Geuss

• In Event: Reimagining Political Realism

Abstract

Some thinkers (e.g., Herbert Deane and Reinhold Niebuhr) identify Augustine as a political realist because of his perceived pessimism and emphasis on human sinfulness. Other, more recent thinkers (e.g., Eric Gregory and Michael Lamb) argue that Augustine is not a realist. These thinkers emphasize not the role of sin but instead the centrality of love in Augustine’s thought. However, despite these interpretive disagreements, the opposing parties in this debate nevertheless agree that if Augustine is to be counted as a political realist, the grounds for doing so lie in his emphasis on sin and a resulting pessimism about human nature and politics. Against this consensus, I read Augustine as a realist (as with the former camp) but precisely because of the centrality of love in his thought (as with the latter camp). I do so by engaging the thought of contemporary realist Raymond Geuss, particularly his 2016 work Reality and Its Dreams. While Geuss rejects the theological foundations of Augustine’s political thought, he rather surprisingly commends Augustine’s account of love as a response to the contingent features of our lives. Geuss sees this account of love as consonant with his own realist project insofar as Augustine’s emphasis on love recognizes the limits of reason and the inescapability of contingency in our political arrangements. Geuss thereby helps us see how Augustinian realism might be grounded in something other than sin and pessimism. Yet, as I will suggest, the connection between love and contingency that Geuss prizes in Augustine is, in the end, inherently reliant upon the theological framework – particularly creatio ex nihilo - which Geuss rejects.

Author

• Elly Long, Princeton University