Augustine and the Limits of Politics

In this series of meditations reintroducing Augustine into the contemporary political realm, Elshtain brings to the fore his idea of temporal self living in the human city and examines the implications of this anthropology for civic virtue. She argues that this provides a public space for an ethos of care, love, and loyalty while recognizing the strictures that human fallenness must necessarily place on temporal politics. Concurrently, her portrait of Augustine shows him to be a man of paradoxes. She evokes his delight in "the world" together with his acute sense of its brokenness; his dedication to reason along with an awareness of its limits; his ease amidst cultural pluralism and multiple interpretations. Elshtain also explores the ties between Hannah Arendt and Augustine, tracing the latter’s development of the reality of evil in Arendt’s thought.