Eric Gregory’s Politics & the Order of Love is challenging, witty, beautifully written. He interrogates various versions of political Augustinianism, especially Augustinianism in relation to liberal order - the Augustinian realism of Niebuhr, a Rawlsian Augustinian procedural liberalism, a virtue-oriented Augustinianism from Elshtain and O’Donovan, and an anti-liberal Augustinianism from Milbank & Co. Gregory’s book aims to defend “Augustinian civic liberalism, with its emphasis on love and civic responsibility,” which he claims “succeeds in exposing weaknesses in Niehburianism, Rawlsianism, and in Radical Orthodoxy.”

As he sees things, the key issue in Augustine is the relation of love and sin. A sin-centered Augustinian liberalism is realist, pessimistic, tempered; a love-centered Augustinianism is perfectionist and (as Gregory’s attention to Hannah Arendt shows) potentially totalitarian, love tragically collapsing into pragmatism and violence. Gregory says, “the error of both views is a failure to relate love and sin to each other in ways that constrain both appeals. Left unconstrained by sin, a first paradigm of politics appeals to love (and related notions of friendship, fraternity, care, community, solidarity, and sympathy) in ways that have justified antiliberal perfectionist politics - indeed a theocratic one, if possible. Left unconstrained by love, a second paradigm of politics relies on realist appeals to sin (and related notions of cruelty, evil, and narrow self-interest) in ways that have justified essentially negative forms of political liberalism. Both outcomes, arrogant perfectionism and negative liberalism, are normatively inadequate.”

Gregory’s initial superb summary of Augustine’s story is as follows:

Augustine claims that human beings are “bundles of loves . . . constituted by loving, and being loved by, others and God.” These loves are not “essentially conflictual” in a way that prevents “any possibility of a peaceful intersubjective social ontology.” Nor do they “pit autonomous action or feeling over against publicly shared action or feeling.” Though “a self always stands in relation to the world, including the political world, in terms of her loves,” the fall means that loves are “disordered, misdirected, and disproportionate . . . diverse and often self-defeating . . . beset by many potentially pathological corruptions that disrupt an original justice: the order of the soul that opens up to relations with others.” Especially pride “distorts love even as it too remains a kind of excessive love” that “refers virtue to oneself and ‘hates a fellowship of equality under God.’” Pride is the chief sin because it is the refusal to be loved: “The greatest failure of love is when love itself is not receptive to the reality of another lover; that is, when the lover is pridefully unwilling to be beloved.” Humility, which Augustine roots in “love of God and God’s own humility in Christ, corrects disordered love,” and enables the person to love well and freely, and to value what is truly valuable. Learning to love in humility requires an askesis that progressively and imperfectly realizes the life of charity, which is “always in danger of being corrupted by prideful self-possession.”

Gregory’s claim that giving a right political ordering to love and sin is essential to healthy Augustinian politics seems right on to me, and he is right about the dangers of uncoupling the two. But I have some reservations. I’m more convinced by the Radical Orthodox/Hauerwasian assaults on liberalism than Gregory is. I don’t want to leave Niebuhr behind, but Gregory is exactly right that Niebuhr’s failed “to recognize the Augustinian claim that church . . . is itself a historical, sacramental reality.” Once the church is recognized as such, though, I’m not sure what is left of liberalism. (I suspect I’m using “liberalism” in a somewhat different sense than Gregory.)