Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Reflections from the City of God: On the Role of Religion in Inculcating Civic Virtue

I’ve been delayed in writing about my next selection from the City of God–this view_of_rome_as_the_city_of_god_poster-r332f2a9125be4d48b9f3d29d2e055265_wve_8byvr_512one from early in Book II, a book devoted to exploring the extent to which the Roman gods did not protect Romans from sundry disasters. But the particular disasters Augustine has in mind are moral disasters–not disasters of the body but disasters of the soul–and he highlights the vice and civic decay not only enabled but positively stimulated by the Roman gods. Here is Book II, Chapter 6, in full:

This is the reason why those divinities [MOD: in the previous chapter Augustine discusses Cybele, the “Earth Mother,” in particular] quite neglected the lives and morals of the cities and nations who worshipped them, and threw no dreadful prohibition in their way to hinder them from becoming utterly corrupt, and to preserve them from those terrible and detestable evils which visit not harvests and vintages, not house and possessions, not the body which is subject to the soul, but the soul itself, the spirit that rules the whole man. If there was any such prohibition, let it be produced, let it be proved. They will tell us that purity and probity were inculcated upon those who were initiated in the mysteries of religion, and that secret incitements to virtue were whispered in the ear of the elite; but this is an idle boast. Let them show or name to us the places which were at any time consecrated to assemblages in which, instead of the obscene songs and licentious acting of players, instead of the celebration of those most filthy and shameless Fugalia [MOD: civil feasts] (well called Fugalia, since they banish modesty and right feeling) [MOD: I think that Augustine is relying here on the root, ‘fuga,’ meaning ‘flight’], the people were commanded in the name of the gods to restrain avarice, bridle impurity, and conquer ambition; where, in short, they might learn in that school which Persius vehemently lashes them to, when he says:

Be taught, ye abandoned creatures, and ascertain the causes of things; what we are, and for what end we are born; what is the law of our success in life; and by what art we may turn the goal without making shipwreck; what limit we should put to our wealth, what we may lawfully desire, and what uses filthy lucre serves; how much we should bestow upon our country and our family; learn, in short, what God meant you to be, and what place He has ordered you to fill.

Let them name to us the places where such instructions were wont to be communicated from the gods, and where the people who worshiped them were accustomed to resort to hear them, as we can point to our churches built for this purpose in every land where the Christian religion is received.

One of the interesting features of the this chapter and, indeed, the entire book is the extent to which Augustine believes it to be religion’s role to inculcate virtue–including civic virtue–in its adherents. The morality that Augustine is discussing is not a private or interior morality, at least not solely. In the previous chapter, he castigates the Romans for bestowing their finest citizens with the honor of a statue of “that demon Cybele.” Robert Dodaro writes: “[E]ven Rome’s best citizens are deceived by Cybele, the ‘Mother of the Gods.'” Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine 45. And here, Augustine specifically mentions the morality not of individuals, or even of families, but of “cities and nations.” The context in which he condemns Roman vice is not personal, but public–the feast of Fugalia, which so far as I can tell is a civic feast celebrating the expulsion of the Roman kings. And the fragment he quotes from the stoic Roman satirist Persius concerns both private and public virtue (“how much we should bestow upon our country and our family”).

Augustine clearly believes that it is an important function of religion to inculcate civic or public virtue and honor. Religion is not a privatized or purely personal phenomenon, and any religion worth its salt must do more than “whisper” “secret incitements to virtue” “to the elite” (notice that by highlighting the “elite,” Augustine is emphasizing the importance of religion’s influence on the powerful, including the politically powerful). It must inform their private and public lives. It must provide a public forum–a place of assembly–for the discussion of virtue to occur (not just a private “whispering”). And it must “vehemently lash” public men. Christianity, Augustine believes, performs these functions, while the Roman gods failed to do so.

A final aside: I was struck by the fragment of Persius, because it sounds so much like the words that Dante puts into the mouth of Ulysses in Canto XXVI of Inferno as he sails to the ends of the earth (118-20):

Considerate la vostra semenza:

Fatti non foste a viver come bruti,

Ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

“Consider your origins: You were not made to live like beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.” Unfortunately for wandering Ulysses (at least in Dante’s telling), he was not in the end able to discover “by what art we may turn the goal without making shipwreck.”

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Andrews (ed.), “Churchmen and Urban Government in Late Medieval Italy, c.1200-c. 1450: Cases and Contexts”

This month, Cambridge will publish Churchmen and Urban Government in Late 9781107044265Medieval Italy, c.1200-c. 1450: Cases and Contexts, edited by Frances Andrews (University of St. Andrew’s) with contributions from Agata Pincelli (University of St. Andrew’s) and others. The publisher’s description follows.

Why, when so driven by the impetus for autonomy, did the city elites of thirteenth-century Italy turn to men bound to religious orders whose purpose and reach stretched far beyond the boundaries of their often disputed territories? Churchmen and Urban Government in Late Medieval Italy, c.1200–c.1450 brings together a team of international contributors to provide the first comparative response to this pivotal question. Presenting a series of urban cases and contexts, the book explores the secular-religious boundaries of the period and evaluates the role of the clergy in the administration and government of Italy’s city-states. With an extensive introduction and epilogue, it exposes for consideration the beginnings of the phenomenon, the varying responses of churchmen, the reasons why practices changed and how politics and religious identity relate to each other. This important new study has significant implications for our understanding of power, negotiation, bureaucracy and religious identity.

  • The first comprehensive study of the employment of men of religion, including penitents, monks, and other viri religiosi in late medieval Italy
  • A broad-ranging comparative history including case studies across thirteen different Italian city-states and regions
  • Includes studies of the phenomenon of employment beyond the cloister from the perspective of individual religious orders
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Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France”

Next month, Stanford University will publish Rhinestones, Religion, and the 0804786003Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France, by Kimberly A. Arkin (Boston University). The publisher’s description follows.

During the course of her fieldwork in Paris, anthropologist Kimberly Arkin heard what she thought was a surprising admission. A French-born, North African Jewish (Sephardi) teenage girl laughingly told Arkin she was a racist. When asked what she meant by that, the girl responded, “It means I hate Arabs.”

This girl was not unique. She and other Sephardi youth in Paris insisted, again and again, that they were not French, though born in France, and that they could not imagine their Jewish future in France. Fueled by her candid and compelling informants, Arkin’s analysis delves into the connections and disjunctures between Jews and Muslims, religion and secular Republicanism, race and national community, and identity and culture in post-colonial France. Rhinestones argues that Sephardi youth, as both “Arabs” and “Jews,” fall between categories of class, religion, and culture. Many reacted to this liminality by going beyond religion and culture to categorize their Jewishness as race, distinguishing Sephardi Jews from “Arab” Muslims, regardless of similarities they shared, while linking them to “European” Jews (Ashkenazim), regardless of their differences. But while racializing Jewishness might have made Sephardi Frenchness possible, it produced the opposite result: it re-grounded national community in religion-as-race, thereby making pluri-religious community appear threatening. Rhinestones thus sheds light on the production of race, alienation, and intolerance within marginalized French and European populations.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

A Penny for the Old Guy

At Mirror of Justice, my friend Rick Garnett has an interesting post about Guy Fawkes Day, which, for those of you who don’t know, was yesterday. The day commemorates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a conspiracy by British Catholics to blow up Parliament and end the Protestant Stuart dynasty. (Amusing, in its way, because the Protestantism of the Stuarts was always a little suspect). Guy Fawkes was one of the conspirators–the one in charge of the explosives–and for centuries Britons commemorated the day by burning effigies of Guy and the Pope. Nowadays, the holiday has morphed into Bonfire Night, in which Britons across the country light huge fires and set off fireworks. Probably the whole thing will morph into Halloween one of these days.

As an American, I’ve always thought knowing about Guy Fawkes Day was a mark of anglophile eccentricity, rather like reading P.D. James or renting Elizabeth R on Netflix. But here comes Rick, who writes that his public school celebrated Guy Fawkes Day as a holiday. And Rick comes from Alaska! Obviously, this great country is more than I know.   

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Tragedy of Religious Freedom at Stanford Law School

Next Monday, I will be discussing The Tragedy of Religious Freedom at Stanford Law School’s Center for Constitutional Law, which is headed by the eminent Michael McConnell and directed by Jud Campbell. The format of discussion is a conversation, and I’m confident that we will have a very good and interesting one.

The details: Monday, November 11, 5:30-7:30, Student Law Lounge. Registration instructions may be found here.

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Fowler, Hertzke, Olson, & Dulk, “Religion and Politics in America: Faith, Culture, and Strategic Choices”

Next month, Westview Press will publish a new edition of Religion and Politics in America: Faith, Culture, and Strategic Choices by Robert Fowler (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Allen Hertzke (University of Oklahoma), Laura Olson (Clemson University), and Kevin Dulk (Calvin College). The publisher’s description follows.Religion and Politics in America

Religion and politics are never far from the headlines, but their relationship remains complex and often confusing. In this fifth edition of Religion and Politics in America, the authors offer a lively, accessible, and balanced treatment of religion in American politics. They explore the historical, cultural, and legal contexts that underlie religious political engagement while also highlighting the pragmatic and strategic political realities that religious organizations and people face. Incorporating the best and most up-to-date scholarship, the authors assess the politics of Roman Catholics; evangelical, mainline, and African American Protestants; Jews; Muslims and other conventional and not-so-conventional American religious movements. The author team also examines important subjects concerning religion and its relationship to gender, race/ethnicity, and class. The fifth edition has been revised to include the 2012 elections, in particular Mitt Romney’s candidacy and Mormonism, as well as a fuller assessment of the role of religion in President Obama’s first term. In-depth treatment of core topics, contemporary case studies, and useful focus-study boxes, provides students with a real understanding of how religion and politics relate in practice and makes this fifth edition essential reading for courses in political science, religion, and sociology departments.

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Feinberg & Layton, “For the Civic Good: The Liberal Case for Teaching Religion in the Public Schools”

Next month, the University of Michigan Press will publish For the Civic Good: The Liberal Case for Teaching Religion in the Public Schools by Walter Feinberg (University of Illinois) and Richard Layton (University of Illinois). The publisher’s description follows.

Why teach about religion in public schools? What educational value can such courses potentially have for students?

In For the Civic Good, Walter Feinberg and Richard A. Layton offer an argument for the contribution of Bible and world religion electives. The authors argue that such courses can, if taught properly, promote an essential aim of public education: the construction of a civic public, where strangers engage with one another in building a common future. The humanities serve to awaken students to the significance of interpretive and analytic skills, and religion and Bible courses have the potential to add a reflective element to these skills. In so doing, students awaken to the fact of their own interpretive framework and how it influences their understanding of texts and practices. The argument of the book is developed by reports on the authors’ field research, a two-year period in which they observed religion courses taught in various public high schools throughout the country, from the “Bible Belt” to the suburban parkway. They document the problems in teaching religion courses in an educationally appropriate way, but also illustrate the argument for a humanities-based approach to religion by providing real classroom models of religion courses that advance the skills critical to the development of a civic public.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

My Review of “Reading Law” by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner

Commonweal has posted my review of Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, by Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. The piece is behind a paywall, I’m afraid. The review reflects on the nature and value of the canons of textual interpretation–the book’s primary focus. Indeed, it might have been better if the canons had been the book’s exclusive focus. The sections devoted to constitutional theory are not the best parts of the book. The review also discusses the sense in which–notwithstanding the skeptical criticism that has been leveled at them throughout the realist period and thereafter–the canons create something like a linguistic tradition for lawyers. Here is a fragment:

Some of the most interesting studies of law approach it as a distinctive tradition. And like many traditions, law has its own language which informs and suffuses the thought of those who think and speak through it. If the language of the law is not preserved—if it decays through lack of use, disregard, or skeptical dismissal as just so much transcendental nonsense—then the tradition of law dies as well . . . .The core aim of the book is to retrieve and systematize one of the law’s most important and enduring linguistic traditions—the canons of textual interpretation. The canons are not rules as much as rules-of-thumb, presumptions about the meaning of legal texts. Skill in legal interpretation involves the capacity to discern when a canon should, and should not, yield to countervailing considerations . . . .

Reading Law is, as the authors put it, a normative treatise that introduces the language of law to an audience for whom it is largely alien while offering a refresher course for attorneys and judges who have forgotten (or who never really learned) their canons. Like all treatises, the point is not to read through from front to back and I cannot recommend marching through the book’s 414 pages (that’s before the appendices). No one who isn’t looking for it will much miss the “Scope-of-Subparts Canon” explaining the relationship of subparts to parts, or the “Punctuation Canon,” which warns against “hostility to punctuation” and whose examples include various obscure nineteenth-century precedents involving the use of semicolons. But lawyers faced with interpretive problems will find in Reading Law a pathway to a set of linguistic precepts that structure and enrich the tradition of American law. That is a worthy contribution.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

D.C. Circuit Holds that Owners of For-Profit Corporations Are Injured by Contraception Mandate

This news is a little late in coming, but readers here should know that the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in a 2-1 panel decision (as to this specific issue), has reversed the district court’s denial of a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of the federal government’s contraception mandate against the owners of a for-profit business. Though the panel was unanimous as to the issue of the individual plaintiffs’ standing to bring a claim under RFRA, only two judges (Judge Brown and Judge Randolph) held that the plaintiffs had satisfied the standard to obtain a preliminary injunction against the government. The court also held, 2-1, that corporations themselves do not have standing to exercise religion and so it dismissed those RFRA claims.

I recommend this thorough analysis and critique of the opinion by Kevin Walsh. For the record, and by my count (though I may have erred in my counting, and please write me if so), we now have the following breakdown among the federal circuit court of appeals:

  • Circuits that have rejected claims in which for-profits are plaintiffs on behalf of the corporation and the individual owners: Third Circuit, Sixth Circuit.
  • Circuits that have accepted claims in which for-profits are plaintiffs on behalf of the corporation but not the individual owners: Tenth Circuit.
  • Circuits that have accepted claims in which for-profits are plaintiffs on behalf of the individual owners but not the corporation: D.C. Circuit.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Today is Election Day…

Photo from the New York Daily News

… here in New York City, and CLR Forum reader John McGinnis points us to an interesting New York Times column on the election’s likely effect on some important law-and-religion controversies. Whether the heavily-favored Democrat Bill de Blasio or the Republican Joe Lhota prevail in today’s mayoral contest, the Times reports, the next administration will likely be friendlier than the Bloomberg Administration to the city’s faith communities:

After 12 years of a mayor who has resisted making concessions to religious groups, New York City is in for a change.

The two leading candidates for mayor — Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, and Joseph J. Lhota, a Republican — have pledged to break with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on a range of issues at the nexus of government and religion. They say they would accommodate two of the most important Muslim holy days, allow church services on school property, and work with Jewish leaders to ease the city’s supervision of circumcision rituals.

We’ve covered the last two issues here at the Forum. With respect to church services on school property, the city has been fighting in federal court to stop churches from using public school property for worship services on Sunday; it looks like that litigation will soon become moot. And here’s a post about the particular circumcision ritual that has run afoul of city health regulators.

Religion in New York City is typically (though not always) an ethnic phenomenon. New Yorkers are not so comfortable with overt religiosity; but tribe, we understand. The greater solicitude for faith communities likely reflects a return to classic interest-group politics more than a resurgent piety. Still, it’s interesting to observe the change in tone from the hyper-secular Bloomberg Administration, which actually banned clergy from 9/11 commemorations. By the way, here’s another sign of changing religious politics. When asked to describe his religious views, de Blasio answered, “I have my own spirituality, but it doesn’t take the form of any particular religion.” Our likely next mayor is a None.