Augustine is, it goes without saying, a towering figure in the history of western thought. An influence on philosophers, theologians, and political theorists alike, Augustine is often referenced, quoted, and cited, but perhaps rarely understood in all his rich complexity. As Lamb claims, “Apart from perhaps Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, no other ancient thinker has had more influence on Western politics” (ix). And yet, as with many “influences,” the actual relationship between the influenced and the influencer may, at times, be tenuous at best. 

It is no shame that most inheritors of Augustine have not read most of his work, as one would be hard pressed to find many authors more prolific; by common accounting, Augustine left us with somewhere north of five million words of sermons, treatises, letters, dialogues, and more. In such a voluminous corpus, it is perhaps unsurprising that receptors of Augustine’s legacy have latched on to paraphrastic truisms about his supposed teachings on faith, politics, and hope for the future. 

These truisms go something like this: Augustine was a pessimist par excellence. In developing a distinction between the earthly city and the heavenly city, and by encouraging Christians to place their hope in the heavenly city and not to look for salvation in the earthly one, Augustine inaugurated a tradition of thinking seriously but practically or realistically about politics, limiting the aspirations of those who would engage in this-worldly activities of citizenship. Thinkers as diverse as John Rawls, Bertrand Russell, Hannah Arendt, and Martha Nussbaum have counted him a “pessimist” about politics, or really more fundamentally about human nature. Lamb quotes Nussbaum’s accusation that Augustine provides a pessimistic “politics of shame” due to his “‘perverse’ view of sin and ‘otherworldly’ longing for the heavenly city,” (2) a heavy accusation indeed. Not to be outdone, Christian thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Stanley Hauerwas have found in Augustine the grounds for a kind of useful if perhaps excessive realism, in the case of the former, or for a kind of repudiation of the pursuit of secular politics altogether, in the case of the latter. 

Using an analogy from Augustine’s own works, Lamb accuses these diverse receptors of Augustine of being like a man who looks too narrowly at a single part of a mosaic. By zooming in on merely a part of a beautiful whole, Augustine’s proponents and critics alike miss the mosaic for the tiles. At the root of Augustine’s theology and politics, Lamb argues, is a particular theological virtue: Hope. Hope is a central virtue of Christian living this side of the eschaton, looking forward to a renewed creation. But it is also, Lamb argues, a central virtue in applied Christian living: in what do we place our hope? For what do we hope? These are questions Augustine answers, and on Lamb’s account, it is high time that his readers and receptors pay attention to those answers. 

Lamb is a careful and thorough scholar, and the breadth of that scholarship is frankly astounding. Readers may be surprised at how quickly they finish the book relative to its thickness, for the body of the text comprises 274 pages, the notes and bibliography an additional 150. There is a point early in the book, however, where some of his readers might take pause. In staking out the ground he plans to tread, Lamb clarifies that he departs from Augustine in key ways: “Augustine also held beliefs and accepted practices I find deeply disturbing. He held patriarchal views about women. He defended the use of coercion to compel religious dissenters to return to orthodoxy as understood by the Catholic Church. He not only accepted the institution of slavery but also used it as a metaphor to describe human beings’ relationship with God” (11-12). But of course, on at least two of these fronts, Augustine is simply following scripture. To the extent that Augustine’s proposed “coercion” is part and parcel of the process of church discipline, surely a coercive process by some definitions, Augustine is supporting the process outlined for the New Testament church. In employing the metaphor of slavery for the Christian’s relationship to God, Augustine is merely following those who, like Paul, think of themselves as slaves to Christ. That Lamb leads with these caveats does not, however, detract from the work done throughout the text, which deserves careful attention to those interested in historical approaches to Christian politics.

Before turning to the more explicitly political elements of the work, Lamb spends time in philosophy, particularly the relationship between faith and reason in the process of both forming and defending beliefs. Although this is far from a work of apologetics, Lamb spends serious time in the book engaging with a kind of epistemology of religion that believers ought to find refreshing and helpful. It is not only our contemporary philosophers of religion in the modern world who have advanced arguments about the importance of testimony and authority in the formation of belief. Instead, Augustine presents a philosophically rich account of the use of authority in tandem with reason to arrive at religious belief: we ordinarily develop beliefs on the basis of testimony from trusted authorities. This is true in all areas of life, not merely faith-based ones. As a general rule, our trust and our belief precede our rational comprehension and articulation of those beliefs. 

It is only, perhaps, when our beliefs are challenged that we begin to seek out “rational” justifications for beliefs we already hold. We may find reason, when challenged, to revise our beliefs, and perhaps eventually find reasons to disbelieve in previously trusted authorities. Authority and reason are, on this account, interrelated: we develop our reason in consultation with authorities, and presumably ought to trust authorities that ultimately commend themselves to our well-functioning rational capacities. 

This religious epistemology, which I can only summarize here, is not a mere tangent to the overall work. Instead, it forms the necessary preface to Lamb’s ultimate claim that Augustine is more sanguine about the possibilities of a peaceful, plural city than his receptors have acknowledged. The interplay between faith and reason, and the fact that Augustine himself models the use of reason in his attempts to persuade pagans, even through the use of appeals to their own non-Christian authors, ground Lamb’s central argument. Augustine can thus be characterized as having a hopeful politics, if not a certain and hopeful optimism for some sort of permanent transformation, then at least a hope for the possibility of concord in plural cities with mixed membership. The ordinary process of belief formation, common to believers and unbelievers alike, seems to be the grounds for the possibility of peaceful living across fundamental divides in final ends. In other words, Augustine’s hopeful approach of politics on Lamb’s account could in turn inspire hope in those who today despair of finding common civil fellowship with the pagans among whom they live. 

Hope has faith as its ground, a faith in that which is unseen and that which has yet to come. But hope has a this-worldly, present aspect as well. One can have an Augustinian hope for the peace of the commonwealth, for example, and it is in his chapter on “hope for the commonwealth” that Lamb touches most directly on disputes that currently divide many contemporary commentators on political theology. Augustine’s theology prevents him from believing in any so-called “neutrality.” The final end of earthly life is not mere civil peace but eternal peace in union with God. This, however, does not relegate this-worldly peace to irrelevance, and Lamb’s Augustine is far more sanguine about the possibility of peaceful politics than many would assume. For some, those “Augustinian realists” that Lamb criticizes, “the primary purpose of politics is not to promote good but to prevent evil, not to foster virtue but to restrain violence” (182). This captures only part of the Augustinian project, Lamb argues: Augustine’s first form of concord is that “a man should harm no one” (182). The second, however, “more positive form of concord” is “that he should do good to all, so far as he can” (182). Lamb argues that it is this second form of concord which “challenges those who cast politics simply as a negative remedy for constraining the effects of sin” (182). 

How can someone pursuing highest ends as a citizen of the heavenly city unite with those in his civic community who are pursuing quite different ultimate ends? These members of the two cities can unite around common goals of peace in the commonwealth and can share the classic and civic virtues that Christian and pagan alike find cause to praise. Those members of the heavenly city who seek this peace have resources available to foster it, namely their reason. It is true, on Augustine’s account, that faith and belief can precede reason, that it is quite ordinary for someone to come to believe first and then find rational justifications for their belief later. But this does not preclude or prevent those believers from engaging in reasonable discussion about political matters with those who are not members of the heavenly city, to persuade them to unite around common temporal, rather than ultimate and eternal, ends. In pursuing those temporal ends, Augustine argues that Christians and non-Christians alike can share similar excellences of character. 

Lamb treats this overlap extensively in a chapter on “hope among the civic virtues.” Here, he draws on Augustine’s moderate praise for the Roman republic and its eminent citizens as examples of virtue and character worthy of emulation. Though Augustine obviously privileges Christian virtue, Lamb argues that “his views on non-Christian virtue are more ambiguous, nuanced, and inclusive than many friends and foes assume” (261). “Piety, humility, and hope” are, for Augustine, “genuine virtues that can be shared by diverse citizens, including those who do not belong to the institutional church” (262). In sum, Lamb writes, “While the City of God is the standard by which all earthly commonwealths are judged, the common objects that unite a commonwealth need not necessarily be theological, even if Augustine may have preferred them to be. Rather, he encourages citizens of different religions, cultures, and creeds to unite around common objects of love and hope, especially the good of civic peace” (263-4). 

Lamb’s Augustine is not a relativist, nor ultimately pluralistic in terms of final ends: “He clearly believes that civic peace participates in eternal peace and that some ways of life are more conducive to happiness than others, both for the citizen and the city” (185). He does recognize, however, that the earthly city will always be mixed in membership and incomplete. The question at the heart of a properly Augustinian politics would then seem to be, not “what would a Christian political community look like,” but rather “What would it look like for a Christian to faithfully engage in a pluralistic political community? How would a Christian go about fostering peace, concord, and civic virtue for the good of all citizens?” The answer is not for a Christian to forsake their Christianity in favor of some neutral public reason, nor is it to despair of the possibility of temporal peace. It is instead to employ the tools common to all men to pursue the temporal ends common to all men, which could in turn create the conditions that facilitate the pursuit of both temporal and eternal happiness.