It is no exaggeration to say that Augustine initiated the tradition of Christian theologico-political reflection. The New Testament periodically speaks about the Christian community's relation to the political order. However, its statements typically serve a limited purpose, namely, to draw attention to the distinction between and legitimacy of the things of Caesar and things of God. In the second and third centuries, works like Athenagoras' Plea and the Letter to Diognetus tried to offer more fulsome accounts of Christianity's stance towards the civil order. It was not until Augustine that this distinctive form of thought came into its own. Several of his works, the most famous being the City of God, grapple directly with the perennially vexing question of the faith's relation to civil society. The virtue of this kind of reflection is not found in its ability to offer concrete political guidance to any particular regime. It rests elsewhere. Most notably, it lies in the seriousness with which it takes Christianity's transpolitical claim about “the universal way of deliverance” (City of God, 10.32) and classical political philosophy's claim that human beings are by nature political animals. Simply put, its virtue lies in its willingness to think these two claims together.

Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love presents itself as a work within this tradition. His tome is unmistakably, and one gets the impression intentionally, encyclopedic in scope. Besides providing a reading of Augustine, Gregory, an assistant professor of religion at Princeton, touches on the thought of a dizzying array of religious, philosophical, political, and social theorists—the index alone lists upwards of 300 proper names. This derives in part from the book's aim. As Gregory makes clear early on, he did not, nor did he intend to, write a book that tried to capture the richness and complexity of Augustine's own theologico-political thought. For “my purposes, what Augustine actually meant is less central than the ways in which the relevant passages from his works have been interpreted (and applied to politics) in the modern period” (7). Rather, Gregory chose to enlist a “conceptual analysis . . . [that] can swing free from the quest for the historical Augustine” (7). While this approach necessarily pushes Augustine further and further into the background, it does conspicuously pave the way for the presentation of Gregory's own admittedly “ambitious” form of “Augustinian liberalism” (368).

Gregory begins by presenting, praising, and criticizing the political forms Augustinianism takes in the modern period, by which he means during the last century. He identifies four such forms. The first, the “Augustinian realism” associated with Reinhold Niebuhr, emphasizes the sinful character of man and Augustine's teaching on the two cities, the City of God and the earthly city. It characteristically stresses the political order's perpetual need to lessen the disordering effects of sin through the hard-nosed implementation of reasonably just laws and the use of coercive force when necessary. Positively responding to the work of John Rawls, another kind of Augustinianism stresses the political role that “fairness” must play in pluralistic societies. Gregory traces yet another form of Augustinianism running from the works of Paul Tillich, Paul Ramsey, Martin Luther King, and (rather incredibly) Gustavo Gutierrez up to contemporary theorists like Jean Bethke Elshtain and Oliver O'Donovan. In Gregory's view, this diverse group is united in its criticisms of the limits of realism and fairness and its twin emphases on the role of civic virtue and the need for political forms of love. Unlike these sects, Gregory's final group of Augustinians, those associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement, enlists Augustine in their critiques of liberal societies.

The central part of the book is given over to introducing the roles care and love ought to play in political life and in Augustinian civic liberalism. Gregory here finds an unlikely pair of bedfellows: Augustinian liberalism and feminist theory. Culling the writings of Joan Tronto, Martha Nussbaum, and Fedder Kittay, he alleges to have discovered commonalities between the two groups' insistence that care should find political expressions in liberal societies. He also examines the pointed criticisms Hannah Arendt developed of Augustine's account of love and the dangers love poses to liberal politics in her Heidelberg dissertation. The chapter on Arendt is undoubtedly the most focused and studiously crafted chapter in the book. Moreover, it limns the framework in which Gregory unfolds his notion of Augustinian liberalism.

Against a backdrop of the “increasing self-absorption displayed in a rights-governed and consumer-oriented liberal culture” (369), Gregory advances an Augustinian ethic of democratic citizenship that “talks mostly” about love and citizenship (366). Offering a corrective to the lamentable misreading to which Augustine's distinction between uti and frui is too often subjected, this ethic “uses Augustine's grammar of love and sin to open up more conceptual space within liberal politics” (368). It appeals to Augustine's account of love's ability to move men and shape human societies as a salutary means of offsetting the sterility and impersonality of mainstream social and political theory. Gregory's proposal tries to “shift political Augustinianism away from an account of sin abstracted from theology to an account of love that provides the context for understanding this account of sin” (80). Employing the “grammar of love,” his theory aims to give an account of how we can be both rights-bearing individuals and loving and caring fellow citizens genuinely concerned with each other's well-being and devotion to a common good.

At some point, however, one has to ask how Augustine factors into this account of liberalism. Here we encounter the radical limits of intellectual reception history when it is applied to a thinker of the first rank like Augustine. Augustine himself rejected the sufficiency of such an approach. He tells us that, after reading Cicero's Hortensius, his intellectual conversion took the form of an all-encompassing love of “Wisdom itself, whatever it might be” (Confessions, 3.4), not adherence to the doctrines of any “philosophical school.” Augustine ultimately found this wisdom in the salvific way of life offered to fallen human beings by the God who “became flesh.” Despite Gregory's statement to the contrary, his rational reconstruction unfortunately does not take these kinds of “fundamental questions” seriously (372). Illustrative of this is his admission that his notion of “Augustinian civic liberalism” does not focus on “the general relation of Christian to non-Christian virtue” (373). That lacuna may charitably explain his surreal claim that for students of the man who wrote the Confessions and the City of God “Christology should be political” (379).

Shirking the challenge of wrestling with the complexity of Augustine's thought, Gregory never really takes the full measure of Augustine's argument about the indispensability and limits of justice in political life or his argument that Christians' participation in political life is ultimately rooted in the infused theological virtue of charity. Like the contemporary theorists he desires to engage, Gregory seems to view the theologico-political problem essentially as a technical problem. When all is said and done, an ambitious form of “Augustinian liberalism” is his preferred solution. For this reason, he is not truly alive to the basic claims philosophic modernity—“if there is such a thing” (384)—and the regime it helped bring into existence originally made about human beings, politics, the whole, and God. Nor does he seem to be genuinely alive to Augustine's argument that the solution to the problem of human living Christianity proposes is, and will always remain, essentially transpolitical. A reflection on modern liberalism and its discontents that draws its true inspiration from Augustine, truth be told, would have to take the basic claim of each position with the utmost seriousness. Lamentably, Gregory's book never rises to meet this challenge.