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It is no exaggeration to say that Augustine initiated the tradition of Christian theologico-political reflection. The New Testament periodically speaks about the Christian community's relation to the political order. However, its statements typically serve a limited purpose, namely, to draw attention to the distinction between and legitimacy of the things of Caesar and things of God. In the second and third centuries, works like Athenagoras' Plea and the Letter to Diognetus tried to offer more fulsome accounts of Christianity's stance towards the civil order. It was not until Augustine that this distinctive form of thought came into its own. Several of his works, the most famous being the City of God, grapple directly with the perennially vexing question of the faith's relation to civil society. The virtue of this kind of reflection is not found in its ability to offer concrete political guidance to any particular regime. It rests elsewhere. Most notably, it lies in the seriousness with which it takes Christianity's transpolitical claim about "the universal way of deliverance" (City of God, 10.32) and classical political philosophy's claim that human beings are by nature political animals. Simply put, its virtue lies in its willingness to think these two claims together.
Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love presents itself as a work within this tradition. His tome is unmistakably, and one gets the impression intentionally, encyclopedic in scope. Besides providing a reading of Augustine, Gregory, an assistant professor of religion at Princeton, touches on the thought of a dizzying array of religious, philosophical, political, and social theorists--the index alone lists upwards of 300 proper names. This derives in part from the book's aim. As Gregory makes clear early on, he did not, nor did he intend to, write a book that tried to capture the richness and complexity of Augustine's own theologico-political thought. For "my purposes, what...