Public reason

It is often assumed that theology has no place in the public sphere. All reasons are permitted in a liberal democracy, but ‘religious reasons’ are not among those that can gain widely shared assent, and so these are ruled out of court. Theological reasons are deemed ‘private’, partial, and thus they do not concern the public, the political, the universal, or the common good. On one level, this is an entirely theoretical exclusion, since ‘religious reasons’ most certainly animate many major public debates about moral goods (e.g. debates about abortion, euthanasia, poverty, marriage, sex, religious freedom, human rights). Yet this exclusionary principle seems to be necessary, we are told by advocates of political liberalism, because ours is a uniquely pluralist situation, and since ‘religion’ is divisive it cannot serve the common good and peace that the state is charged with securing. Most judges will not allow ‘religious reasons’ to influence their decisions, and theological reasons are never admitted into the debates of national political cultures without serious prudential reservations. Public arguments might well be difficult to settle through the democratic process, and such arguments may be deeply informed by people knowledgeable about a wide array of temporal matters, but theology should not be one of them. It seems, then, that public reason seeks the help of all kinds of reasons, except for theological reasons. Why? There are various reasons, not least our mythical assumption that religious rea-

sons are divisive and thus contrary to the common good.1 There is also the idea that ours is a uniquely pluralist situation that calls for new measures with respect to ‘public reason’. Because there were so many competing theological voices in the early modern period, and because we now have the problem of ‘religious diversity’, including theistic and atheistic claims about the nature of reality, we assume that we have arrived at a historically unique moment in which that which counts as ‘public’ can no longer count as ‘religious’ precisely because of our new pluralist arrangement. Such an objection can be defused by returning to older voices, and by showing that our context is not more but less pluralist, and that modern liberal orders have not excluded religious reasons from the public, but have made liberalism itself into a shared religious framework. In the first part, I will examine Augustine’s exemplary philosophical, legal, and

theological critiques of the Roman Republic – the res publica, ‘public thing’ or ‘public reality’, or what we might call ‘public affairs’. Rather than present his critique

abstractly, I will examine his response to a concrete moral problem – namely that of honour and justice in taking life – which will help us to compare his approach to a similar case in our own time. In the second part I examine the invention of the modern secular idea of ‘public reason’. We will see that it involved turning away from the idea that public affairs should be understood in relation to that which is transcendently and objectively true and good, and instead focused on new ideas of collective consent. The third part of the chapter demonstrates how these new ideas about the res publica have shaped all discussions of ‘theology and public reason’ in the twentieth century, especially in debates surrounding the work of the political philosopher John Rawls. I will ask whether contemporary constructions of ‘public reason’ continue to detach us from claims about what is transcendently and objectively true and good – about reality (res). In the final part, I will suggest that modern secular public reason seeks to be comprehensive in precisely the way that theology seeks to be comprehensive. Both theology and secular public reason seek to provide human beings with a way of understanding how the world hangs together. That secular public reason does not recognize any transcendent accounts of reality does not, however, mean that it does not make world-comprehensive claims. Theologians might offer ‘public reason’ an important check, then, on precisely the transcendenceaversion that liberal orders seem committed to. On the one hand, theology might help public reason to identify and resist forms of totalitarianism that threaten when human beings construct systems of power divorced from our capacity to know the truth – including the totalitarian tendencies of modern secular public reason itself. On the other, theology might exemplify for the world another mode of public reason – one that can admit more reasons in relation to the source of reason itself.

A fourth-century African bishop can help us to deflate the claim that our situation is uniquely pluralist. Like Plato and Aristotle, St Augustine was aware that there were many competing accounts of the nature of reality. In The City of God Augustine displays his own grasp of the plurality of Roman beliefs. He considers all the major philosophical schools. The Stoics, the Sophists, and the Sceptics all have comprehensive doctrines embodied in their various ways of life (it never occurs to Augustine that these comprehensive doctrines would be simply matters of private opinion).2 In his analysis of the many competing views he surveys, Augustine offers profound analyses of all the ways in which competing accounts of the good life function as what we would today call ‘religions’. While some of Augustine’s discussions are theoretical, his opening arguments with Roman readers begin with concrete and practical concerns. Take the example of his argument with Rome about suicide. Many Romans

believed that, in certain circumstances in which a person’s honour was at stake, suicide was reasonable and morally justified. Augustine attends to several suicides in Book One, and pays special attention to the suicide of Lucretia.3 This is particularly important since Lucretia’s suicide, as every Roman reader knew, was the instigation for the Republican uprising that finally ousted the kings and founded the Roman

Republic. Lucretia’s suicide was not seen by Roman readers as an ‘intrinsically evil act’, but as a noble act – an act which defended a person’s honour and dignity. It is partly because of the influence of Augustine’s public arguments that we no longer think of suicide as noble. His argument, however, is not simply theological, but he weaves a complex cord of publicly accessible reasoning that is philosophical, moral, and theological. Augustine’s philosophical argument is interspersed throughout his analysis of

suicide in Book One. He tells us that his case is constrained between questions of virtue, or ‘the order of right living’ on the one hand, and ‘reasoned argument’ on the other.4 So he often goes back and forth, between virtue and intellect, between life and thought, between goodness and truth, between moral, philosophical and theological argumentation. His philosophical argument is essentially that suicide is irrational. Drawing partly upon Stoic reasoning, Augustine argues that suicide is an act that is ruled by the emotions – by either a sense of shame or dishonour – and readily sees that ‘any man of compassion would be ready to excuse the emotions which lead them to do this’.5 But that’s just the problem: suicide is a flight from rationality itself. It allows the emotions to rule tyrannically over the body rather than to find the proper harmony for the well-ordered life conformed to truth. He gives the example of Judas.