Do we need God to be humble? If so, then it seems that secular humility is impossible, as any move towards denying God could imply deifying humanity. Julie Cooper’s challenging and illuminating Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought provides close readings from key works of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau to fashion a genealogical narrative of humility within a secular context (and the secular for Cooper is a political realm where human agency is “independent of divine authority or authorization” so that “politics is a human construction” (3; see also 204 fn75). It is this definition that clouds some of what occurs, however, to which I will return below.

Contra the narrative that argues denying or bracketing God corresponds with replacing God with human beings, Cooper highlights strands in Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau, which instead redefine humility by opposing any self-deification while still endorsing human freedom, the empowering of human beings, and a secular critique of pride. Such a critique is not founded upon biblical notions of an omnipotent God and finite human beings, but contends that inflated conceptions of one’s worth are dangers to society. Whereas Augustine, according to Cooper, links human agency with pride (think Pelagianism, though not mentioned by Cooper), her highlighted thinkers promote modesty from an awareness that this purely human realm is lived in by human beings and not gods.

One immediate problem is that all these thinkers are theists, even if not always judged so by their contemporaries, leading to obfuscation where any hypothetical secular/sacred dividing line would exist in their works. Cooper’s problematic definition of the secular also surfaces here. Regarding Hobbes’ secular critique of pride, Cooper highlights Job’s influence, rather than Augustine’s, but Cooper neglects the varied possible readings of Job, including Augustine’s. Overall, though, the chapter still succeeds; as does her subsequent portrayal of how Spinoza reinterprets modesty as a means for self-empowering; while Rousseau develops a healthy love of self which admits failures and sins (that Rousseau famously confesses moral blemishes but is blind to his failure to raise his children himself while writing volumes on how to educate youth is not addressed). Regardless, readers of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau will find this work particularly valuable. Those seeking links between theistic and nontheistic conceptions of humility, however, will be disappointed.

The premise of the work is somewhat dependent on a particular (and implied) reading of Augustine. By Cooper’s account, Augustine’s system is one in which humanity is disempowered and dependent because of belief in God. God chastens and limits human actions and endeavours. According to Cooper, Augustinians “invoke humility to ‘dampen’ and ‘discourage’ human agency” (154) and “Augustinian theology frames the question of politics and its authorization as an affront to divine sovereignty” (155). These statements are both too broad and superficial, and supporting citation is practically non-existent. Instead, Cooper takes for granted an Augustinian system and legacy to promote non-Augustinian accounts that “resist the conflation of human agency with pride” (4). Politics, thus, is necessarily a sphere lived devoid of God, even as “Augustinians demand [one] choose between God and man, humility and pride, sovereignty and finitude” (158). But in The City of God, Augustine is clear that both worlds overlap and integrate. Moreover, belief in the Incarnation renders any supposed choice between God and humanity irrelevant (a choice also nonexistent in Rabbinic Judaism). Jesus, according to Augustine (and traditional patristic theology), is the Johannine notion of “the Word made flesh.” Cooper, however, is sparse on any sustained analysis of Augustine and so her nuanced, highly engaged method of reading (and often clarifying and rehabilitating) the thought of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau is not applied to the Augustinian corpus (Cooper only cites The City of God).

There is much to lament in Augustine or in certain Augustinian tendencies and phrases, from his often unhealthy sexual ethos (which can however be a type of counter to sexuality without consequences and love) to his often polemical tirades against opposing views, leading to stark and unambiguous conclusions. Ultimately, an opening, detailed chapter on Augustine’s writings on humility, freedom, faith and dependence on God, and sin (especially in his biblical exegesis and sermons) would have deeply enhanced this otherwise interesting and important book. So, too would her account of the sparse but still influential political strands in Augustine’s thought, as Alan Ryan included in his magisterial On Politics.

Also unfortunate is Cooper’s minimizing of the potential for her book to serve as a bridge between Christian and secular conceptions of humility, what she succinctly writes as a “basis (e.g., shared enthusiasm for humility) for agonistic respect between Christians and partisans of nontheistic creeds” (152). She wants the focus to be primarily on the value of a genealogical approach (“as a case study in the Nietzschean theme of the revaluation of values” [9]). This approach highlights the contingencies, variations, and complexities of the history of humility and modesty in secular thought, which she does not see as “the functional equivalent of Augustinian humility” (154).

Cooper wants to develop and narrate a type of secular humility which accepts and celebrates human finitude, even as it denies any higher power. This denial, Cooper contends, does not spur from an attempt to self-deify or replace God or theistic religion. Rather, secular humility, as developed by the core foundational thinkers she focuses on, empowers humanity through acknowledging limitations in one’s means, aims, and goals. By acknowledging one is not omnipotent but mortal, space opens up for greater freedom and empowering within limits, which Cooper somewhat confusingly calls “full empowerment without omnipotence” (105).

In the Augustinian account, so it goes, humans are depraved from the fall and only submission and dependence on God can liberate. Likewise, good deeds and actions are only ascribed to God through the gift of grace (and because God is the Source and Fount of all that is good). If coming from a strict Calvinist tradition, this narrative could be fully accurate, but surprisingly, Cooper does not examine more widespread contemporary Christian views (like Catholic Social Teaching and liberation theology) which resonate with certain social justice, ethical and spiritual strands of Augustine while distancing themselves from problematic areas. What is omitted further limits the dichotomy she claims between Augustinian frameworks, assumptions, and conceptions and those who challenge them. If more space had been given to grapple with Augustinian beliefs, Cooper’s attempt at a modest revaluation of secular humility would only have been strengthened, not to mention establishing a greater resonance between some religious and secular proponents of a certain kind of humility. It would not have solved whether one needs God to be humble and whether secular humility is possible, but could modestly have claimed deeper insights in responding to those crucial questions.