The purpose of this self-consciously ambitious, wonderfully comprehensive, and often judicious scholarly book is not to recover the thought of the “historical” St. Augustine for our time. Eric Gregory is not particularly attuned to what Augustine really said, and he sometimes, in fact, lets the reader in on what Augustine should have said, typically from a contemporary liberal point of view. Nor is he in pursuit of theological truth or even the fundamental truth about who we are as human persons. He limits himself, for the most part, to the impact that certain parts of Augustine's writings have had on twentieth-century political theorists. He takes for granted that liberal democracy is superior to pre-modern, paternalistic, or theocratic or non-rights-based forms of political life, and he presents himself as certain—without presenting supporting public policy analysis—that existing liberal democracies could be improved by “a kind of Augustinian civic virtue” that “might in turn encourage a more ambitious political practice” (p. 8). His basic thesis is that liberal concern for justice, understood as the protection of equal rights, is compatible with the loving and virtuous or charitable political pursuit of an “actual society” that is more just, egalitarian, and caring (p. 14). He claims that liberal democracy as it now exists, particularly in the U.S., is depressingly inegalitarian and depersonalizing or far too dominated by the apathetic indifference or materialistic self-absorption characteristic of capitalism. So, the new direction or “distinctive interest” of Gregory's reconstruction of the Augustinian tradition is “in relating love of God and love for neighbor in politics” in order to develop “a political ethic of care” (p. 176–77).

Gregory proclaims that his ambition is to reconcile those who write in the Augustinian tradition today with modern—meaning contemporary—liberals. He writes to build a coalition on behalf of a combination of liberal justice and Augustinian love by purporting to show the Augustinians and liberals that, on the level of politics, there's nothing over which they fundamentally disagree. Now that history has pulverized the utopian illusions of socialism or communism, it is, in fact, fairly hard to find scholars who do not want to perpetuate or accelerate the liberal devotion to personal autonomy and have government exhibit a more aggressive concern for the weak and the vulnerable. An exception here, Gregory presents, is the small group of radically orthodox or fairly Augustinian thinkers who believe that modern autonomy and Christian love are incompatible. To them he sensibly argues that there is no current alternative to liberal democracy, and he adds, much more questionably, that under the flag of his liberal/Augustianian coalition, the liberal quest for justice can be animated by the virtue of charity—or personal action based on love of particular persons—much more than it has been so far. The radically orthodox share Gregory's criticism of the faux realists who depend on “a demythologized notion of original sin” (p. 9), but they will, I believe, remain more than skeptical about the plausibility of Gregory's own demythologized notion of the virtue of charity.

There are limits to the inclusiveness of even the most ambitious coalition building. By “liberal,” Gregory means liberal Democrat, and he leaves beyond the scope of the coalition of the loving the few remaining Lockean, libertarian, or classical liberal scholars, as well as lots of ordinary, unscholarly, “fundamentalist,” or unreflectively patriotic Americans. Surely a book with a more theoretical intention would have said more on behalf of the Augustinian dimension to classical liberalism. It might have also said more about an Augustinian skepticism present in modern authors from Pascal to Nietzsche to Strauss about the authenticity or effectiveness of any effort to sustain “Christian values” in the absence of Christian faith.

In my view, the continuity from Christianity to, say, Lockean liberalism is the Augustinian insight that neither natural nor civil society can account for who we are. We persons are not merely part of some impersonal natural process or part of some country or cave, but have an irreducibly free and trans-political core to our beings. Our personal love points beyond the imperfections of sinful and biological existence in the direction of a personal God who can know or care for each of us as he or she truly is. Modern liberalism begins by retaining Augustine's insight about personal freedom and discarding his faith in the personal God. For the modern liberal, love of God, and indeed personal love in general, is for suckers. There are excellent Augustinian reasons for being suspicious of any appeal to civic virtue, just as there is reasonable doubt that personal love can and should be expressed politically. Gregory criticizes the self-proclaimed realistic skeptics, who say that all apparently charitable action—all virtuous responses to suffering—is really disguised self-interest, for carrying the idea of sin too far. And he employs that criticism against all procedural liberals (from Locke to Rawls) who restrict the domain of justice because love can so easily become politically pathological. But skeptical liberals, it seems to me, do not rely on even a demythologized view of sin; they just want to maximize personal freedom understood as autonomy or self-direction. One purpose of early modern liberalism was to free us from the debilitating delusion that sin is the cause of what ails us. A powerful characteristic of the liberal tradition is its thought that, to be delivered from evil (so to speak), we must be delivered from the illusions of both love and sin.

Some might say that the only Augustinian way to make liberalism personal or relational is to restore faith in the trans-political personal God who loves and cares for each of us as a particular being. An authentically Christian liberalism, at least in principle, points in the direction of achieving some of Gregory's admirable vision of reconciliation. Christian liberalism—as Gregory sometimes shows in his most careful discussions of the actual writing of St. Augustine—can describe a kind of virtuous perfectionism that is compatible with both personal freedom and our invincible, sinful limitations. It can reconcile love and dignity, support the feminist desire to overcome the patriarchal distinction between man and woman through personal caregiving, relativize without abolishing political life and its pursuit of justice, make us more at home in this world by showing us the true cause of our restless homelessness, and avoid the extremes of hyper-communitarianism and hyper-individualism by distinguishing between the irreducible, relational identity of a person and self-absorption. To find an example of such a Christian Augustinian liberal today, there's no need to look further than the present philosopher-pope, and Americans might look to the philosopher-storytellers Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor.

Most of the members of the coalition of the virtuously loving, however, join the classical liberals in not believing in a personal God. The renewed Augustinian tradition that Gregory proposes must be sensitive to this pluralism. For example, the feminists' concerns for politicized caregiving need not be understood to have Christian roots, although the perception of the truth of Christianity did, in fact, raise the status of women and their distinctive virtues in the world. The authentically Augustinian members of the coalition “cannot expect liberals to ‘confess Christ is lord’ in order to become good lovers and good citizens.” Nor should they succumb to “the temptation” to believe that they, or Christians in general, know the whole truth about God or virtue (p. 256). They, as coalition members, cannot even claim that their view of virtue is specifically Christian, although somehow it has to remain specifically personal. For the coalition to endure, even Christology has to become merely political. It can't depend on whether Christ was who he said he was or whether what he promised is true. At the coalition meetings, there cannot be any divisive talk about whether we really are sinful, fallen beings, or whether this biological life is all there is for particular persons. The logos that becomes flesh cannot have anything to do with the personal origin or destiny of each of us.

With the help of Richard Rorty, Gregory wants to bring Walt Whitman—who was all about the love—and John Dewey—who was all about citizenship—into the coalition. He seems inclined to agree with that great trinity that the achievements of Christianity must be historicized to provide our country with real political hope. It is true that Gregory is quick to add that a true Augustinian cannot agree with Rorty, Dewey, and Whitman when they proclaim that we have to forget about theology and eternity to avoid cruelty and achieve happiness (p. 366). But, he does believe our shared civic virtue does not depend on them. So, for Gregory, the theory of his coalition ends up being something like Rorty's non-foundationalism or Rawls's overlapping consensus.

The secret to breadth is to sacrifice depth, or to forego, as Rorty recommends, real thought about who we are—not to mention who or what God is. This able and erudite book serves best as a reminder that the amalgam of liberal secularism and Protestant or Augustinian Christianity that has always animated the American reformist tradition remains and may always be somewhat incoherent and unstable. So, it is fitting that Gregory offers an eloquent, authentically Augustinian conclusion: While “earthly politics cannot fulfill the deepest longings of a human person or community … [r]ights, respect, and democracy are good things, even if they are not the fulfillment of love” (p. 384).

Probably my greatest moral objection to this book is that it says so little to challenge its primary audience—American liberal academics. I agree with Gregory that the undeniable progress in the direction of justice over the past sixty years for African Americans, women, and others can't be understood without some attention to Christian love. And he does well, of course, to employ Martin Luther King Jr. to illustrate the edifying and effective rhetorical mixing of Christian love and liberal justice. But it's not at all clear that, on balance, that period of time has been good for personal love in our country.

A genuine analysis of feminism, for example, would include a candid cost-benefit analysis of its effects on the family and of the fact that politicized caregiving is hardly likely to be an adequate replacement for the personal, voluntary caregiving that has atrophied in recent years. The same sort of analysis would consider why the same feminists who speak eloquently in terms of concern for the weak and the vulnerable are so insistently pro-choice when it comes to abortion and other “life” issues. It's not so easy, after all, to reconcile personal love with the modern view of autonomy, which is too anti-natural and individualistic to be authentically Christian. A genuine Augustinian would, I think, exhibit a lot more “tough love” when it comes to the complacency of contemporary liberals regarding their own virtue and the contempt they show for the genuinely Augustinian (or evangelical and orthodox) personal faith in a personal God exhibited by so many ordinary Americans.

To say the least, it's not clear to me that a greatly expanded redistributive national government would either genuinely be motivated by love or increase the real amount of personal love in our country, but Gregory clearly writes in support of the “Yes, we can” spirit of sophisticated America today. Theoretical gentleness and practical vagueness may be indispensable features of a coalition-building book, but one downside is that that method of writing doesn't give the author much room to display his moral or intellectual courage.