A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought
By Michael Lamb.
Princeton University Press, 2022.
Hardcover, 448 Pages, $39.95.
Reviewed by Daniel B. Gallagher.
One of the most difficult things to instill in the minds of college-aged students today is the subtle autonomy of the secular order within the Christian worldview. By that I mean the extent to which finite realities are afforded the goodness due them, both as created by God but also as directed toward Him as their final end. The first major thinker to flesh this out was Augustine of Hippo, even though many scholars look askance at his work, believing him to have created something out of the Gospel that was not originally there. “His worst rhetorical excesses,” writes Mae Forrest Barnes, “pushed Christian theology to a radically toxic message, one that is hard to extricate from our (i.e., Christian) doctrine.” As incorrect as this assessment is, it is not hard to see how young readers can arrive at a similar conclusion if they misread Augustine’s purpose for writing about his sins in the Confessions and the context in which he writes them.
Lamb’s specific intention is to challenge that pessimistic view of Augustine. “The picture that emerged” from such a misreading is “of an otherworldly, sin-obsessed pessimist who encourages us to renounce the world and seek the City of God.” The key to recovering a more accurate picture of what Augustine is up to is the category of “hope,” which Lamb suggests is “an especially valuable … ally in our contemporary moment.” To capture this Augustinian hope, we need to pay closer attention to Augustine’s entire corpus despite all its magnitude and complexity.
The central claim Augustine develops over time is that, for Christians, the love of God prevails to the extent that all earthly concerns and individual desires are subjugated to it. The pagan world conflates civic and religious duty so that the latter is subsumed by the former. No major political deliberation or battle was undertaken without priests meticulously consulting the auspices, primarily consisting in a heuristic reading of avian organs.
Through the lens of hope, Lamb shows how Augustine allows individuals to belong to the City of God and the Earthly City simultaneously, since all worldly concerns and endeavors are shaped by the love of God and contribute to man’s proper end of union with Him. Christianity distinguishes itself from paganism because it sees that the necessities of the world are contingent upon the free, unnecessitated choice of the Creator. The cosmos is not the ultimate horizon, but rather the result of God’s generosity and free creation.
Rather than sapping earthly goods of their value, Augustine’s Christian worldview restores and supercharges them with their true value. By rejoining Augustine’s political ideas with his theology, Lamb wants to “recover Augustine’s conception of hope as a virtue that finds a way between vices of presumption and despair and trouble the simplistic dichotomy between optimism and pessimism often imposed on his thought.” Engagement in public life, rather than diverting Christian pilgrims away from God, provides them with “opportunities…to develop and exercise virtues in ways that can express and even deepen their faith.”
In Part I of the book, Lamb, with particular reliance upon the Enchiridion, specifies hope’s proper objects and grounds. Hope must be contextualized with reference to faith and love, for faith supplies hope with the grounds to believe, and love confers the motivating power that propels hope’s pursuit. Hope, in turn, provides faith with its proper motivation and love provides hope with the “resolve needed to endure time’s difficulties and delays.” A correct alignment of these virtues challenges any categorization of Augustinian hope as purely otherworldly, for they are the very basis of the “order of love” that compels Christians to use and orient temporal goods toward the one eternal good. Lamb goes so far as to suggest a corresponding “order of hope” that “allows a robust hope for temporal goods” that will keep Christians from falling into the “vices of presumption and despair.”
Augustine’s training as a rhetorician—precisely the training that, according to Mae Forrest Barnes, made Augustine’s influence so “toxic”—is the topic of Part II. Lamb demonstrates how this training underpins the style we encounter in the City of God and explains how Augustine endows the temporal realm with a dignity based on the dignity of language and the word. Through a careful analysis of Book 22, Lamb shows that Augustine’s description of earthly evils is not an expression of pessimism, but rather “an excessive use of rhetoric in the mixed and grand styles that reorients readers’ faith, love, and hope.”
Part III, containing Lamb’s most original contribution to Augustinian scholarship, considers whether and how political goods can be proper objects of hope. Augustine, Lamb argues, encourages citizens to share common objects of hope in the present world rather than waiting for the eschaton. Christians are called to share in the goods of the commonwealth in the here and now, especially by aiming at civil peace. Indeed, Augustine asserts that this is a primary aspect of the episcopal ministry as he encourages bishops to engage with the world in a way that fosters the good of the commonwealth. Such sharing is the very hallmark of civic virtue, and it can even be practiced by Christians and non-Christians alike.
Lamb has made a significant contribution to reinterpreting Augustine’s political thought in light of a fuller articulation of his treatment of the virtue of hope. Although he admits that a revisioning of contemporary politics is not his main goal, it is not difficult to see that he tacitly proposes Augustine as a key figure in that revisioning. A trend of distrusting earthly goods and a seething pessimism of political activity threaten to obscure Augustine’s vision of the commonwealth. Many of my own college students are all too eager to employ Augustine as a defender of post-liberalism or a proponent of withdrawal from public life. Lamb shows that if we fail to take Augustine seriously on his own terms, we could easily fall into a deep suspicion of civic and religious freedom.
It did not take long for the new Augustinian pope, Leo XIV, to remind us that a correct vision of freedom irrevocably ties it to truth, both of which are intrinsically ordered to the peace of the commonwealth. Lamb formulates the scholarship that underlies Leo’s practical application of Augustinian hope: “I believe that religions and interreligious dialogue can make a fundamental contribution to fostering a climate of peace. This naturally requires full respect for religious freedom in every country, since religious experience is an essential dimension of the human person. Without it, it is difficult, if not impossible, to bring about the purification of the heart necessary for building peaceful relationships” (Audience with Members of the Diplomatic Corps, 16 May 2025).
Though dense, Lamb’s book is an essential read for those wishing to revalue civic responsibility and the intrinsic good of earthly things in leading us to the City of God.
Daniel B. Gallagher is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Literature at Ralston College.
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