In the preface to their remarkable new book, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, Stan Hauerwas and Rom Coles insist that whatever novelty we find in their efforts follows in large measure as an ‘afterward of the friendship’ they forged in collaboration.Footnote ¹ ‘The friendship is the thing’ and surely they are right. Its traces appear repeatedly across the pages of their book – in the seriousness with which they proceed, in their mutual desire ‘to teach each other something or to learn from one another’Footnote ² and in the virtues displayed in their exchanges, virtues that, as Aristotle reminds us, distinguish the best kind of friendships.Footnote ³ A friendship which emerges in collaboration and a collaboration which yields interesting books typically require substantial measures of justice and humility on both sides, and evidence of these virtues abounds on these pages. Still, it is the courage of these two friends which stands out.

We scholars have identities which are very much a consequence of the views which attract us and much of what we do amounts to little more than explicating and defending what we hold dear. Most of us spend our days in communities of the like-minded – patrolling the borders, initiating the recruits and passing on identities that index membership. But scholarly collaboration quite often threatens what we love and the mechanisms of self-creation and defence which we employ. Put your cherished views in close and lively conversation with those of another, give yourself little chance to escape their doubts and dissents, and you are very likely to end up with different views. Pursue the give and take of collaboration with a friend, where disagreement proceeds without animosity and doubts come leavened with goodwill, and you are very likely to find yourself alienated from the community of scholars which once called you their own and from the self which until now you thought you had. Collaborations can be dangerous in precisely this way, friendships too, and it strikes me that this friendly collaboration required courage for precisely these reasons.

Consider the fact that Coles takes Christian theology and social witness seriously, not as interesting social facts, not because Christians are many and their influence substantial, but rather because he has discovered fellow travellers in Rowan Williams and John Yoder. In their efforts to say what it means to follow Christ, he finds resources for his own efforts to imagine a democratic politics. That he might find inspiration in this company comes as no surprise to those of us who have spent our careers reading and teaching Williams and Yoder, and yet secular political theorists are not exactly encouraged to work among the theologians, and with the prominent exceptions of Bill Connolly and Jeff Stout, few have. No doubt, this engagement with the theological other gives expression to the kind of politics that Coles prefers, the kind that accents ‘deliberation about differences’,Footnote ⁴ and yet it remains an uncommon engagement for all that and one can't help but admire the courage involved.

Or consider that fact that many of the themes and accents that we have come to regard as distinctively Hauerwasian come under special scrutiny in this book. The hermeneutical priority of the biblical narrative, the church as a unique community of character, the virtues as the habits one needs to follow Christ, the inescapable reality of hierarchy and authority, the tragic character of temporal life – all are themes that Hauerwas has attached to himself through his efforts to explicate their substance and defend their merit, and yet one leaves this book wondering what substance he thinks they still have and what merit remains. What Hauerwas does next with his own inheritance – what he chooses to keep, what he transforms, and what he abandons – may well be one of the most important episodes in the development of early twenty-first-century Christian ethics.

Notice, then, what we've got in this collaboration. One man entering a field beyond the boundary of his own, the other taking a critical look at a field that he has cultivated over three decades, and both wondering aloud whether discursive boundaries create false hope for constancy of self over time and security for community in space. Indeed, both suspect that these boundaries and this hope must be abandoned in a politics called democratic and in a church that struggles to be the vulnerable body of Christ. My point is that this effort takes courage, and so too these conclusions, and that we should be grateful for each.

In what follows, I'm going to try to say what radical democracy and radical ekklesia amount to, what warrants there might be to say that churches and democracies are best described in these terms, and in the end I'm going to argue that the warrants just aren't there. We should forgo the radical and settle for just democracy, just church. At the same time, I will not try to convince you that the courage exhibited in this project proves false, a mere semblance, simply because it was exercised in an effort whose aims I cannot entirely endorse.

Of course, there is a prominent stream of Christian social thought that would encourage precisely this conclusion. By these lights – let's call them hyper-Augustinian – a virtue that appears true will turn out to be false once we have discovered its service to projects and desires which we do not share. Refuse Rome's temporal ambitions and you must also refuse Roman self-restraint a place among the virtues. To convince your reader that it makes sense to dismiss as a vice what appears as virtue, you will then need to identify a semblance of real virtue with the substance of the alleged imposter. Convince your reader that this so-called virtue is nothing but this semblance and you will have made your case. You will have shown that what appears to have the marks of true virtue is in fact nothing but vice in virtue's clothing. In Augustine's case, you will have shown that all temporal politics is nothing but self-policing in the service of glory, nothing but lust for power, fear of death and craving for control.

Hauerwas and Coles stand together, all four feet, in this hyper-Augustinian stream, and in a way, my differences with them turn on our different attitudes towards that stream. They stride in up to their boots, while I refuse to get wet. Put another way, Augustine's legacy is mixed; it comes to us not whole, but in fragments, and we, his heirs, must determine which pieces to pick up and which to pass by. Hauerwas and Coles accent the discussion of pagan virtue and temporal politics in the City of God while I prefer Augustine's remarks on idolatry and just love from book 4 of the Confessions. Of course, in a way, Hauerwas and Coles also admire those remarks from book 4. While they do not say so explicitly, there is a sense in which Hauerwas and Coles share Augustine's worry about idolatry, about our tendency to settle in love too hastily, too completely on any particular temporal good. But at the same time they resist Augustine's solution. He suspects that our idolatrous tendencies can be resolved only as we take on the just love of Christ, while they are inclined to think that democracy and church made radical will do the trick. They might also insist that their departure from Augustine on this matter is less than it seems, that they accent the radical in order to avoid unjust love, but I'm not convinced and in the end I'll bring in Plato's Alcibiades – garlanded, drunk and angry – to help justify my doubts. In the meantime, I want to consider what radical democracy entails, what Christianity's connection to the radically democratic might involve, and what each has to do with Augustine's critique of pagan virtue and his grievance with idolatry.

Ends and activities

In the introduction, Hauerwas and Coles contend that democratic politics which goes radical ‘is not finally about results’; it's not about getting this or that done or rearranging the world in this or that way (p. 2). It might begin with concrete ends in mind, but radically democratic politics is ‘shape-shifting trickster’ politics (p. 194); it takes people with common interests, draws them into a campaign which regards ‘relatively minor issues’, and then quickly and subtly shifts focus from ends to activities, from getting things done to ‘cultivating radical democratic modes of culture and power’ (p. 143). The conviction which justifies this shift in focus also picks out the specific activities which distinguish these modes.

Consider, first, the trouble with ends, with the undemocratic spirit which can accompany their pursuit. It follows from the fact that ends must be settled upon. Goods must be located and judged worthy of our intentions. Unjust threats to these goods must be identified and means must be found which might secure them from these threats. So too, the relevant people need to be mobilised; they need to be convinced that these goods are worth caring about, that these unjust threats are both immanent and serious and that these means are worth the effort. Quite often this requires a prophetic voice which calls a people into being through the recognition and pursuit of certain common goods. These are, of course, rather ordinary sources of political action, so why are they troubling? Why do they give the radical democrat pause? Because a judgement about the importance of some end, the merit of some means, the substance of some injustice, or the unity of some political ‘we’ quite often excludes other possible judgements. So too, every prophetic voice which frames the world in speech and calls a people into being invariably drowns out other voices, other ways of framing the world, other possible ends and actions which might constitute the common life of the people (pp. 48–51). And of course, every possible community of political agents has boundaries and hierarchies which order its affairs and enable its agency but which also exclude some members and subjugate others. In sum every action, every campaign and every settled judgement about the good and the right limit other possible courses and silence other possible voices.

If democracy is principally about equality and freedom, then it must resist these potentially ‘arbitrary exclusions, subjugations, and dangers’.Footnote ⁵ It must undergo a radical reorientation of accent and focus. Its essential characteristic must be tension-dwelling among various differences, irregularities and possibilities of the world (pp. 19, 151–3). It must be more about tending to those differences and irregularities than intending anything in particular. It must be more about caring for those life forms where democratic tending has already taken root than about rearranging the world in this way or that. As such, it must be more about listening to the voice of the other than about using one's own voice to generate agency and constitute identity (p. 46). It must be more about receptivity to the other (pp. 46–51), openness to novel experience (pp. 37, 63), and waiting on the good (p. 43) than about taking the initiative (p. 42), willing to rule (p. 40), or struggling towards this or that successful outcome (p. 34). So conceived, it must accept the fact that democratic selves and democratic communities have porous boundaries, that they are perpetually unfinished, that their substance is chronically uncertain.

What relations might obtain between radical democracy and Christianity? Well, on the one hand, there are points of overlap and dependence. In the United States, radical democratic modes of political activity have been embodied most vividly in the Black Church and exhibited most plainly in its struggle against Jim Crow. So too, the Gospel portrait of Jesus as generously receptive to strangers, as nonviolent in all things and unconcerned with success in the world, provides warrant and substance to these modes.

On the other hand, Coles points out that there is something about the democratic spirit embodied in the lives and practices of the early civil rights movement, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in particular, which is ‘irreducible to Christian debts and nevertheless crucial to what is admirable’ in that spirit. The same can be said of the current practices of Ernesto Cortez and the other Industrial Area Foundation (IAF) organisers; their initiatives mediate this same irreducible spirit. No doubt, the churches have offered these figures, practices and movements a certain image of the beloved community and a certain impulse to ‘nonviolent vulnerability and enemy love’ that is unthinkable apart from the Gospel. But at the same time, one cannot recall the heyday of SNCC organising without also noting that its ‘distinctive experimentalism, openness to experience, . . . profoundly antihierarchical ethos, [and] generous pluralism were engendered very significantly by streams of radical-democratic tradition’ which were ‘irreducible to its Christian inheritance’ (p. 37). Coles admits that it is awkward to put the point this way, to insist that it was only in the company of radical democrats of a certain secular bent that the churches learnt how to be the open and receptive body of Christ, but there's no escaping the history and Hauerwas concedes both the point and the inference which follows.

What follows is a kind of post-post-liberalism in theology. Post-liberalism insists that we give descriptive priority to the vocabularies which emerge from the biblical drama of salvation. In Coles’ words, it assumes that those vocabularies and that drama can always outnarrate other stories, always fit ‘the other into one's own context that is far larger than the other could have supposed’. As such, it always maintains ‘a confidence that the church has within its history ample resources for every eventuality’, every challenge to its identity, every threat to its own initiative (p. 42). Hauerwas has been one of the most vigorous interpreters and defenders of precisely this variety of post-liberal theology, but no longer. Chastened by conversation with Coles and by the radical democratic practice exemplified in the work of SNCC and the IAF, Hauerwas now concedes that the church needs stories of radical democratic practice if its ‘political imagination is to be shaped by the gospel’ (p. 30). Notice the difference. In a post-liberal context, the history of SNCC organising and the promise of IAF initiatives would be fitted into the biblical narrative and regarded as secular parables of biblical truth, but not here, not now.Footnote ⁶ Here these stories are given a certain authority and independence which enables them to help the churches to interpret their own biblical parables. It is as if these stories of radical democratic activity tell the churches what the gospel entails, what its parables regard and what following Jesus involves. The fallout is not a return to old-fashioned Protestant liberalism, where theological convictions are trimmed to fit the contours of some other story, but rather a concession to the fact that the churches quite often need extra-ecclesial assistance in order to understand their own convictions, their own narratives.

What emerges is a picture of Christian life and practice gone radical under the influence of radical democracy, its history, stories and prospects. Christian texts, identities and communities are now encouraged to be porous, vulnerable and unfinished (p. 25, notes 11, 191). Generous and receptive, they should allow themselves to be interpreted and transformed by contact with other texts, identities and communities. Above all, Christians should no longer seek to frame the world in concepts derived from the biblical narrative alone, if only because in this post-post-liberal setting, no story of self, community and world has exclusive interpretative priority over any other. At times, Christian orthodoxy takes the exegetical lead, interpreting the world as we find it and helping Christians keep ‘the story of Jesus straight’ (p. 30). At other times, Christians should cede the interpretative initiative and allow the stories they tell about the character of the world and the substance of discipleship to be retold in unfamiliar vocabularies and alien grammars (p. 42). Indeed, the whole notion that Christians possess something exclusively their own, or that they should compete with others for territory – be it political, cultural or narrative – should now be abandoned. Rather, by these post-post-liberal lights, the church becomes the vulnerable body of Christ only as its boundaries are blurred, its borders left ambiguous and its desire to push back its competitors and stake out its own ground put deliberately to rest.

At this point, it makes sense to ask why we might want our democratic aspirations and involvements, our Christian life and church practices, transformed in this radical way. What, in other words, warrants the radical turn?

Although they don't put the matter in precisely these terms, the reasons that Hauerwas and Coles offer in reply bring together Augustine's account of idolatry with his doubts about pagan virtue, the doubts offered as diagnosis of the disorder. As they see it, any politics which are not radically democratic will always flirt with idolatry and idolatrous politics will always be motivated by lust for power, desire for glory and fear of death. The same can be said of every church and every theology which has not made the radical turn.

In brief outline, the argument goes something like this. What distinguishes the radical turn in democracy and Christianity is the accent on activity, not end; on tending to difference and possibility, not intending this or that in particular; on open and porous boundaries, not secure and stable identities; on mutually interpreting narratives, not on competitive redescription of the other; on generous receptivity, not anxious initiative. But this means that the radical is everything that the idolatrous is not. The idolater is anyone who ignores the various differences, possibilities and irregularities of the world and settles in love and intention on one set of ends, one narrative construal of things, one account of self, community and world. The idolater prefers settled conviction over tending to difference and the pursuit of ends over the cultivation of activities precisely because she wants to control this messy world of difference, possibility and irregularity. She wants to take the initiative and act. She wants to infuse a sense of order into things and receive the glory which comes to one who orders and rules chaotic difference. No doubt, the order which she creates is false, if only because it depends upon arbitrary exclusions and subjugations and yet she loves it nevertheless, this idol of order which she has created. Indeed, she must, for without this settled account of things, this fabricated sense of order, she cannot deny the death which she fears. For what is death but disorder, loss of control, inability to act and failure to keep the upper hand? What better way to escape that fear than to create order, worship it like an idol and defend it from all difference and irregularity, with violence if need be. Thus, Hauerwas can insist that, for Augustine, ‘the clue to the false security at the base of all political deception is the denial of death implicit in the rhetoric of glory’ (p. 24). So too, Coles can say that ‘the death/glory matrix . . . so (most) often captures politics and bends it toward violence’ (p. 32).

Of course, Augustine's account of idolatry is Platonist not postmodern. It turns on the distinction between idolatrous love of some temporal thing and true love of God, while here the distinction is between love which masters itself and settles on one thing and love which allows difference to keep it unsettled. Still, the accents and worries are the same. Disordered love, control of contingency, fear of death, chronic self-deception – all these appear in the discussion of idolatry in book 4 of the Confessions and in books 2 and 19 of the City of God. Recognise that toxic mix and concede its dangers and the reasons which warrant the radical turn should be plain.

But here a puzzle emerges. One would think that the solution to idolatrous loves, untimely settling, desire for control, fear of death and lust for glory would be the moral virtues. One would think that the solution would be justice and courage and wisdom, especially as they have been graciously redeemed and recreated by the Holy Spirit, whose norms are mediated through the preaching, liturgies and practices of the churches.Footnote ⁷ And I suppose, in a book written by Hauerwas alone, the virtues would appear at precisely this point, but not so here. In this book, the virtues have been sidelined or, more precisely, the virtues parsed in the Aristotelian terms which Hauerwas has previously preferred are now regarded with suspicion.

Consider the fact that Aristotelian virtues are distinguished one from another only as they are indexed to ends external to their acts. No doubt, the virtues in this Aristotelian mode perfect certain cognitive and affective activities, but perfection always regards the relation between these internal states and certain ends external to the activities themselves. As such, one exercises moral virtue only as one makes certain judgements about the external ends worth pursuing in this or that instance, and this, in turn, typically requires constructing a narrative of some sort which specifies the various relations that obtain between the pursuit of this end by these means and the other ends and purposes one happens to have. More often than not, this narrative will include an account of one's life as a whole and a portrait of the living well and doing well that one hopes to secure for oneself in the company of those with whom one shares some sort of society. Since the virtues are habits, the judgements and narratives which frame virtuous actions will have to be relatively settled, and this is precisely the problem. Recall the anxiety about idolatry which animates much of what Hauerwas and Coles do in this book. Recall their distrust of anyone who ignores the various differences, possibilities and irregularities of the world and settles in love on one set of ends, one narrative construal of things, one account of self, community and world. And note their diagnosis of this person's fault. All the causal lines can be traced back to her desire for control, her lust for power, her fear of death.

Well, if this is right, then obviously the virtues cannot solve the problem posed by idolatrous loves and the death/glory matrix. Their ‘reifying tendencies’ would only encourage the virtuous to participate in that worship and wallow in that matrix (p. 154). Of course, troubles aside, talk of the virtues is difficult to avoid, and so too the cultivation of habit. Hauerwas and Coles concede as much, but they also insist that democrats and Christians who have made the radical turn can speak of traditional virtues only as they encourage the development of a political terrain which in turn cultivates certain ‘habits of dehabituation’. Coles borrows the idea and the phrase from Sheldon Wolin, and while the phrase is somewhat paradoxical the idea is plain enough. Accent the habit of undermining Aristotelian habit, encourage ‘the shapes and textures of a political terrain’ which will bring about that accent, and you will (in effect) have made the radical turn in democratic and ecclesial practice (p. 154). Why? Because, as we noted above, Aristotelian habit perfects the relations between internal activity and external end. If the need to specify ends locks the virtuous in the idolatrous death/glory matrix, and if the habit of dehabituation offers a means of escape, then one emerges from captivity not only stripped of habit but also turned towards the radical. Ends and intentions will have been deferred, activities given pride of place and selves, communities and narratives left porous, receptive and vulnerable.

Stoic radicals

Suppose we accept this conclusion about Aristotelian virtue and make the radical turn in democratic and ecclesial practice, and suppose we do so in order to solve the problem posed by our idolatrous loves, our desire for control, our fear of death and our yearning for glory. Will this turn do the trick? I'm inclined to think that it won't, and for two reasons. The first has to do with the formal requirements of action specification, the second with the perfection of our activities. The first has to do with ends, the second with virtue; both are matters which the radical turn keeps at a distance.Footnote ⁸

Begin with the fact that it is not exactly clear whether the radical turn makes sense on its own. We are asked to turn from ends to activities, from intention to tending, from care for success in the world to care for the complex differences of the ordinary, but can we make this turn without bringing along much of what we have turned from (or against)? Can we accent activities without also (and always) accenting ends?

Well, leaving aside the whole question of whether there can be contemplative activities which have no end external to those activity themselves, it seems very unlikely that this could be the case with the practical activities which accompany the radical turn – tending, remembering, receiving, accepting, discerning, remaining vulnerable, being porous and so on. Better, I think, to admit that these activities have a mixed character. They can be regarded as ends in themselves, but only as they are also ordered to ends external to themselves. So, for example, Hauerwas and Coles are certainly right to insist that a democratic spirit often finds expression in attentive listening to the other, and they are right to contend that there is something intrinsically worthwhile in this expression of that spirit. Attentive listening is good in itself; full stop. I don't deny it. But nor do I think that recognising its intrinsic goodness prevents us from asking about the ends one might hope to achieve as a result of participating in this activity. Indeed, I suspect that we would be puzzled by the person who listens attentively to the other, is pressed about the ends this activity might achieve, and insists that there are none, that his listening is pure activity. In fact, our ability to distinguish one activity from another is so tightly geared to the different ends our activities are designed to achieve that I suspect we would begin to doubt whether this person knew what attentive listening involves. We may even come to doubt his participation in the activity.

If this is right, if the radical involves a turn from end to activity (or from intention to tending), and if this turning is intelligible only as we re-turn to an end in order to make sense of the activity, then it is not at all clear what remains of the radical. Its substance, so dependent on the independence of activity from end, now seems, well, insubstantial.

This is a philosopher's complaint, I don't deny it, and as such it may be insubstantial itself. Still, it is clearly related to a more meaty worry, one which regards history, democracy and the stories which deserve an attentive ear. One of the great virtues of this book is its attention to stories of SNC activism and IAF organising. Both men are committed to remembering those stories truthfully and telling them well, but one wonders whether this can be done while insisting that these tales bear witness to the radical turn in democratic and ecclesial practice. I don't doubt that SNC activists hoped to cultivate certain activities, or that contemporary IAF organisers share these hopes, but I do suspect that their praise of these activities, of their intrinsic goodness, had everything to do with the specific ends they hoped to achieve in their various efforts to rearrange the world in concrete ways. Indeed, I doubt they would say, as Hauerwas and Coles do, that politics is not finally about results, not about success in the pursuit of certain ends (p. 2). Surely success in the world is one of the things that politics is always about. It might also be about activities, but it is most certainly about success. As Aquinas might put it, listening to another as one should is good all by itself, but listening which secures some good in the life one shares with that other is even better (ST I-II, 5.4). Can we imagine SNC and IAF stories told well without appeal to both sorts of goods? I suspect not.

Suppose this criticism is sound: we can't make the radical turn from ends to activities without coming back around to ends. Couldn't we then imagine a semi-radical turn, one which accented tending, remembering, listening, waiting, receiving and so on, but which also conceded the conceptual and moral necessity of ends? Indeed, one suspects that in a cool hour Hauerwas and Coles would concede that their talk of the radical turn is more exaggerated than real, that it amounts to nothing more than the semi-radical. Fair enough; but I doubt that the semi-radical will deliver what Coles and Hauerwas desire. Recall, they want to escape various Augustinian dangers – idolatrous love, desire to control, lust for glory, fear of death and so on. As they see those dangers threatening in every effort to specify ends, it is unlikely that a semi-radical turn, with its concession to ends, will quiet their fears.

Doubts aside, let us suppose for a moment that they would be willing to give the semi-radical turn a try. Accent activities but don't forget about intended ends and concrete successes. Will those activities by themselves help us escape these Augustinian dangers? It is not likely. Consider, for example, the activity called ‘remembering the dead’. Hauerwas and Coles insist that this activity is at the heart of any democratic or ecclesial practice called radical, and one can easily make out what they have in mind. The dead are the ultimate other, their difference from us complete and their claim upon us eternal, even as they cannot exact from us what we owe. Thus a people who manage to remember stories of the dead and to accept the burden of listening to those who cannot speak for themselves will be a people schooled in the ways difference, in the activities of listening and receiving. Fair enough, but can we expect these happy outcomes to emerge from the activity itself regardless of its place in the order of intention? To my mind, that seems unlikely, if only because we can easily imagine participation in this activity which yields, not receptive attention to difference, but hatred and contempt.

In May 2000, I spent four days touring the monasteries of northern Romania and southern Moldova. Many are built like fortresses and many of these are renowned for the large frescos which cover the exterior walls of the churches. The paintings are beautiful, but many are also disturbing. One repeated theme is the sack of Constantinople, which invariably includes images of Christian martyrdom, Turkish bestiality and, oddly enough, of rabbis leading the charge against the city. (Who knew that the Ottomans enlisted fighting rabbis?) When I asked a colleague at the University of Bucharest what he thought of these images, he paused for a moment and then replied with a smile: ‘remembering the dead helps us keep our enemies in mind’. So it often goes with remembering the dead. The activity alone cannot save us from Augustinian dangers.

Or consider another example dear to Hauerwas and Coles, foot-washing. It is an activity which finds vivid expression in John 13: 4–8 when, during the feast of the Passover, Jesus ‘rose from supper, laid aside his garments . . . girded himself with a towel, . . . poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet’. Startled by this world turned upside down, this reversal of servant and lord, Peter cries out, ‘Lord, do you wash my feet? . . . You shall never wash my feet!’ To which Jesus replies, ‘If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.’Footnote ⁹ It's a powerful story and Coles considers it both a challenge to heroic understandings of Christian love and an opportunity to draw connections between a properly chastened charity and radical democracy. As Coles sees it, trouble comes as we identify with Jesus, with the master who serves, not the servant who receives. This encourages us to think that we must put aside our pride, humble ourselves and serve the least among us – the poor, the lame, the disabled, the enemies of all that we hold dear. We must become agents of love and service, even to those whom we find it difficult to love and serve. This will require strength and will on our part, and so we pray for grace.

But this gets the matter exactly wrong, if only because, as foot-washers, Christians can always deceive themselves. They might speak of humility and love, but more often than not they ‘turn humility and service back around toward will to power’ (p. 218). Like most human beings, they ‘prefer the dignity of self-reliance, the fantasy of being heroic’, and their service to those whom they could otherwise master gives free reign to these unholy desires.Footnote ¹⁰ Instead, Coles thinks Christians should identify with Peter, with the one who ‘endures a foot washing from Jesus’ (p. 220). Peter receives and undergoes, he does not act and serve and, of course, it is precisely this turning from action and ends to activities of patience and passivity which is both the very substance of the radical and, as Coles sees it, the very heart of the Gospel. Coles muses: could it be that ‘this enduring is the very becoming of agape, [of] caritas?’ Could it be that Christians serve and love, not principally in their intentional acts of service, but in activities of vulnerable receptivity to the other (pp. 220, 225), a receptivity that Jesus himself exhibits when his feet are anointed by Mary at Bethany?Footnote ¹¹

So, here again, we have the radical turn from end to activity and, once again, the hope is that this turn can free us from the Augustinian dangers – self-deception, hidden will to power and heroic desire for control – which threaten every end-centred account of democratic politics and Christian love. Can vulnerable receptivity fulfil this hope? Again, I doubt it. I doubt these threats can be avoided simply by sidelining intentional agency and accenting receptivity. Why? Because these dangers tend to corrupt activities as well. Because being washed by another presupposes a willingness to get wet, a desire to undergo and there is nothing about receiving, enduring and undergoing which prevents their corruption by desire gone bad or will turned perverse. Surely we can imagine a person who receives from another, who makes himself vulnerable to the enemy or the stranger and who secretly regards his receptivity as heroic, as a jewel in his crown of glory. And if this is right, then as with remembering, so too with foot-washing: by themselves neither activity can save us from the dangers and idolatries which Hauerwas and Coles fear.

In the textbooks of moral philosophy, the hope that activity alone might save – activity freed from ends external to its act and untouched by virtues which perfect its relation to external states – is given a name. It is called Stoicism. Stoicism makes a virtue of activity and in a way everything I have said so far has been designed to confirm my hunch that the radical turn in democratic and church practice is best regarded as an updated variety of Stoicism.Footnote ¹² The Stoics accent activity at the expense of ends, largely because they doubt our ability to control the transition from internal state to external states of affairs. As they see it, fortune rules that transition and determines success or failure in the pursuit of ends, which in turn justifies their accent on those internal activities which we can control.

Now I am not suggesting that Hauerwas and Coles share this Stoic fear of fortune, but they do have their own anxieties about the relation between activity and end. They do fear that the world of ends belongs to differences and irregularities which cannot be managed without resort to violence and self-deception, and this fear does generate a position with a decidedly Stoic mood and feel. So too, the comedic consequence of any moral or political view which accents activity over end also appears in the radical turn they propose. Make a virtue of activity and you should be able to guarantee the connection between virtue and happiness. Why? Because once taken up an activity cannot fail. One can fail to participate in this or that radically democratic activity – tending, receiving, listening and so on – but once one has begun to participate, success in participation is assured. And of course, once the radical turn has been made, it is participation in these activities which matters most.

Again, I am not suggesting that Hauerwas and Coles make Stoic moves for Stoic reasons, that they praise activity in order to innoculate us from tragedy, but I can't help but conclude that their preference for activities over ends has this effect. It does keep tragic undoing at a distance for, as I said, once the activities which index the radical turn have been taken up, failure is unthinkable. Deliberate or not, it is a puzzling effect, particularly given the list of heroes and heroines which appear repeatedly on these pages. Can we imagine working among SNCC activists and IAF organisers without a healthy sense of the tragic potential in that work? It would seem unlikely. It is difficult to imagine sharing these labours without also wanting to achieve certain external ends and, once you want that, tragedy comes willy-nilly. So too, it is difficult to imagine any collection of activities which can, by itself, save us from the very real threats to democratic equality and Christian faithfulness that have emerged in our day, in our new Gilded Age, threats that Hauerwas and Coles quite rightly fear.

Between irony and idolatry

What might? Well, if will and desire gone bad can corrupt our various activities, then it would seem that salvation comes only as our wills are made right and our desires set straight. So too, if our practical activities are always indexed to external ends, then it would seem that we must do what we can to perfect the causal lines between end and activity. But this is equivalent to recommending the moral virtues parsed in Aristotelian terms and, as I have already noted, Hauerwas and Coles hesitate at precisely this point.

What's needed, then, is a way to make this recommendation somewhat more attractive, and my hunch is that Alcibiades’ speech at the close of the Symposium might just do the trick.Footnote ¹³ That speech proves useful here because the charge Alcibiades makes against Socrates directs us to a disorder of love that Hauerwas and Coles largely ignore. They attend to our idolatrous loves, to our tendency to settle arbitrarily on one thing and to ignore all others. They lament our refusal to be unsettled by the diversity and irregularity of the good. Without denying this worry or ignoring this lament, Alcibiades shifts our attention to the opposite edge of love's spectrum. His complaint is with Socrates’ apparent refusal to settle in love on any good in particular. His lament is that Socrates treats every temporal good as a way station on love's ascent to the eternal.

It is a lovers’ quarrel. Alcibiades feels used. Now he sees Socrates reclining next to pretty Agathon; now he can't control his rage and sorrow. We need not take sides, although I am inclined to think that Alcibiades is right about this particular disorder of love but wrong to assign it to Socrates. Still, I suspect we can feel the force of his complaint. He thinks Socratic love is but a game of irony. The lover woos the beloved, but he holds back half of his heart, reserving it for another. Alcibiades thinks that he deserves more, that his beauty demands loyalty, and that perverse pride compels Socrates to this injustice.

Of course, ironic distance from the goods of this world is not the same as generous receptivity to their complexity and diversity, but the fallout, the refusal to settle in love upon love's object, is much the same and so is the charge. Some things deserve a certain settled affection, not a love that is unrevisable, that cannot be altered by time, circumstance and judgement, but a settled love nevertheless.

So my hunch is this: consider both varieties of disordered love together – both the failure to settle and the propensity to settle too soon – and suddenly the moral virtues look quite useful, quite compelling. The virtues of course strike the mean between two or more extremes, and here we look for loves which settle with neither too much nor too little affection on the goods that deserve to be loved. Neither radical nor ironic, these loves would be just. They would be receptive and generous, not in general, but as right and due. They would attend to the possibilities, diversities and irregularities of the world which deserve attention of this kind, while ignoring the rest. Embody these loves in our democratic and church practices and my hunch is that we would get just democracy, just church.