Imagining Peace: Imagination, Theological Reflection, and Peace-Making in the Thought of St Augustine and St Catherine of Cina

How does the imagination function in the process of peace-making? My approach to this admittedly complex question will be to study two models from history: the model of the peacemaker as political theorist in the thought of St Augustine and the model of the peacemaker as prophetess-saint in the life of St Catherine of Siena.

1. Theological Reflection and the Imagination

How does the imagination function in the process of peace-making? My approach to this admittedly complex question will be to study two models from history: the model of the peacemaker as political theorist in the thought of St Augustine and the model of the peacemaker as prophetess-saint in the life of St Catherine of Siena. My method blends historical analysis with theological reflection and is, admittedly, more narrative than systematic. It also considers two examples from vastly different ages and must do so with brevity. Bearing in mind these caveats, I begin with a few definitions.

Peace. My definition contains a number of overlapping meanings. I will be speaking of peace as a spiritual quality of the person, similar to the way St Paul does in the Letter to the Galatians where he refers to peace as a fruit of the Spirit, meaning that a soul enjoying God’s grace will possess the quality of peace. Theologically this peace is not only a personal trait, but also a description of one’s relationship with God. For Christ, as Paul tells us in Colossians, has destroyed the record of sin that alienated God and humanity, ‘nailing it to his cross’. (Col. 2:14). For Paul this new relationship of grace is characterized as having peace with God. Again and again, he begins his letters to the churches proclaiming the good news that we are at peace with God: ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’. (E.g. Rom. 1:7; I Cor. 1:3; II Cor.1: 2; Gal. 1:3; Eph. 1:2)

I will also be speaking about peace as a state of tranquility or quiet in the social order. This will include harmony in the personal relationships of the individual and a state of mutual concord between governments. The latter sense picks up the meaning of the Latin pax, which in its verbal form, pacisci, means to agree, to form a pact that brings about tranquility, security, and freedom from conflict.

As implied by the last meaning, I will also be speaking of peace-making, or an attempt to bring about such a condition in society.

Imagination. I shall be talking about how the imagination functions in the process of theological reflection in response to the lived experience of believers. One of the main tasks of the imagination in theological reflection is to achieve a linkage between lived experience and the hope of a more perfect world, which is fundamental to the Christ event. That linkage has implications for two contemporary crises: the cognitive crisis of modernity and the socio-economic problem of effecting justice in the contemporary setting.

As David Tracy reminds us, the imagination plays a key role in the development of analogical theological language.^[1] What are the characteristics of that language? First it is a language of ordered relationships articulating similarity in difference. For example, if we have a primary analog (P) and analogies A and B, A and B have a distinct but similar relation to P. The goal of a theological language in which P is the mystery of Christ is to produce a harmony between A and B that is not forced and that occurs by means of a common focus on that mystery. That mystery releases its meaning through a process of reflection and interpretation that is never exhausted.

Theological reflection involves both negations and affirmations. The negations insist on the radical dissimilarity between A or B and P. They intensify the tensive character of P and prevent a slackening of the sense of radical mystery. These negations are balanced by affirmations that speak of the similarity between A or B and P. The affirmations fulfill the mind’s valid need for order and harmony.

The imagination produces the analogies in the process or journey of reflection. That journey begins when the theologian articulates one particular theological focus. By means of the imagination the theologian next creates symbols that express similarity-difference. In this process the theologian always makes reference to the Jesus event, a fundamental question—in our case, what is the meaning of peace—and some lived praxis.

Any understanding of an object of theological inquiry is, then, linked to the process of the imagination. As the primary analog releases its meaning through analogies we see manifested not just the reality of P but the revelatory powers of the imagination. As a result, our understanding of God and world is at the same time an understanding of the self, which can never be isolated from God and world.

When we ask our primary question (what is the theological meaning of peace?), we are also asking what peace means in the world, in this practical situation, and what peace means in the self. Any adequate discussion will always echo these harmonies, while at the same time resisting the urge to blend God-self-world into a forced unity—a warm, fuzzy Gaia experience, if you will.^[2]

2. Augustine’s Vision of Peace:
   The Peacemaker as Political Theorist

With these ideas in mind, let us look at the first of two models of peacemaker: the peacemaker as political theorist. Here we will look at Augustine, whose masterwork is The City of God. I will argue that Augustine’s vision of peace in civil society cannot be understood apart from his theology of history, despite the efforts of many commentators over the years to extract purely political theories from the pages of The City of God.

Augustine’s Age

Augustine wrote The City of God between 413 and 426. A century after Constantine, Christianity had come a long way from the days of being an illegal, often persecuted sect. In the Roman Empire during Augustine’s life, it was not only tolerated but favored. The state had given large sums to Christians for the building of churches. In a society in which church and state were not structurally separated the Romans gave bishops state subsidies for distribution to the poor. Legal codes had been revised with Christian morality in mind. Celibates were allowed to inherit property, concubinage and pederasty were outlawed, and illegitimacy punished. The army too felt the influence of this new relationship. After 416 all officers of the army were required to be Christian.

Rome’s turn toward Christianity was not without its critics. Those outside the Church were still suspicious of Christian allegiances, and some Christians feared closeness to the state would co-opt the Church’s moral authority. After years of disputes between the eastern and western Empire that had weakened the once invincible Roman army, Visigoth, Vandal, and other raiders had taken their attacks from the borders deeper into the Empire’s territory. In 410, Alaric led a Visigoth army in the sack of Rome that resulted in great bloodshed, devastation, and the killing of many of the people of Rome. The barbarian general soon left Rome, and the Empire continued for centuries. But the blow to Roman pride and the psychological dislocation that followed shattered the pax romana. Alaric was an Arian Christian, not a pagan. His victory presented a military and social challenge to Roman civilization, not a theological one. However, as shall be discussed, some pagan Romans used the occasion of the sack of Rome to make a case for the superiority of pagan gods to the God of the Christians. In searching for an explanation for the terror, some fell upon the notion that Christianity, with its pacifist strain, had weakened the resolve of the Empire to fight. It is commonplace to see The City of God as Augustine’s response to that accusation. It was that, but not only that, as shall become clear in what follows.

The debate long has raged as to whether The City of God is a prophetic call to Christian peace-making, or a realistic theory of public order. On the one hand, Ronald G. Musto in his 1986 book, The Catholic Peace Tradition, argues that The City of God laid the framework for a Christian vision of peace-making in the world that derives from the Gospels and was destined to act as a check upon the claims of the state. Augustine’s praise for the Empire and its wars is really a critique of violence and exploitation. Augustine does speak of ‘just war’, but it is for him a perverted imitation of God, which seeks to impose its own dominion of fellow men in place of God’s rule. It hates God’s peace. It does, nevertheless, Musto concedes, provide a degree of order and tranquility in society.^[3]

While Musto is right to suggest that a ‘Christian peace-making tradition’ was present among Christians in the early fifth century and that it was deeply critical of militarism, he overstates his case when it comes to Augustine. Musto’s prophetic, apocalyptic vision of the Church as an alternative society is foreign to Augustine. Origen, writing two centuries before Augustine, when the Church was still the object of persecution, would have been far more receptive to such an idea. But Augustine’s praise of Roman virtues—their love of freedom, their bravery, and their self-sacrifice—and his appreciation of pax romana is not just rhetorical. He understood Rome’s limitations but valued it for what it was.

On the other hand, George Weigel offered a contrary view in his 1987 Tranquillitas Ordinis.^[4] For him, Augustine’s fundamental concern was to establish the realistic conditions for the possibility of a politics of virtue. The goal is the peace of public order in a dynamic political community. War and conflict may have a role in establishing that order, and because of that, pacifism is not only not the moral imperative for Christians but might even be a hindrance to real peace and a concession to evil and injustice.

Weigel is right when it comes to Augustine’s vision of the dynamic nature of war and peace in the public order, and certainly his picture of Augustine is fuller and more realistic than Musto’s treatment. Nevertheless, with his emphasis on public discourse, Weigel gives little shrift to Augustine’s larger understanding of the role of the person in the process of making peace.

Another issue closely related to views on war and peace is the relation of church and state. To what extent is Augustine critiquing the Christianization of the empire? Robert Markus, for example, in the 1970 work Saeculum, offers one view of this, endorsed by Jean Elhstain in her more recent Augustine and the Limits of Politics. He argues that Augustine inveighed against the notion that a Christianized civil order could perfect the earthly city in a way that pagan Rome could never do. Earthly institutions will always be infected with ambiguity and imperfection, escapable only in the heavenly city.^[5]

In contrast to Markus’s view, scholars like John Neville Figgis, have suggested that Augustine at times tends to identify the City of God with the Church on earth.^[6] Echoes of this view can be seen in the post-millennialist understandings of American Protestants like Jonathan Edwards, who got their Augustine via Puritan divines like Thomas Hooker. For them, after the Gospel had overcome its enemies, an age would eventually come when a thousand-year peace would reign on earth before the return of Christ.

Whatever one thinks on these points, the larger outlines of Augustine’s theory of the state are clear. Herbert Deane’s formulation remains solid: The state is an external order. The peace it maintains is an external peace–the absence of overt violence. The state is maintained by the use of force. It has no weapons by which it can save the souls of persons. It is, rather, a remedial, coercive order, which is a consequence of the Fall.^[7]

That external order is contrasted with that of the City of God, which is, emanating from the true nature and essence of God and his creatures, built on love rather than coercion, eternal, not temporary, and participatory rather than remedial.

Peace as Imagined in The City of God

Many of the debates about Augustine’s views of peace miss the mark because they attempt to extract that view out of a political theory of church and state. The City of God does speak to issues crucial to political theory, such as the debate about the definition of the republic in Book II, or the debate about the role of the state as a teacher of virtue, or the question about the nature of the state’s power. Nevertheless, it is primarily a theology of history, as Thomas Merton reminds us in his introduction to the 1950 Modern Library edition of The City of God.^[8]

This is a point easily missed in reading secondary treatments of Augustine but as plain as a barn side to anyone who actually confronts the text in its totality. This is why Merton, sitting in his hermitage in Gethsemane, Kentucky far from a great university library, got it right, and other more bookish types—especially political theorists who think theology a sideshow—tend to get it wrong. Augustine, confronted with violence on a massive scale in the sack of Rome, seeing, as it were, one-thousand 9-11s, hearing of Roman Christians slaughtered, innocent virgins raped, children cut open, while pagans hiding in Christian churches were sometimes spared, could not facilely answer the questions that arose from this terror. It took him thirteen years and over 800 pages in twenty-two books to work through this. How is God with us? How can we believe in a God of peace and justice in the face of such a thing?

He imagines a vision, not simply of another, heavenly existence in which all tears will be wiped away, nor of a completely secular order, deserted by God. But something far more complex in which neither the earthly nor the heavenly elements are subordinated to one another, a kind of ‘micro-macro cosmic isomorphism’,^[9] if you will, in which God works in history. God works in the history of Rome. And he works in the history of the Jews and of his Church. Through it all he is building the City of God. We cannot always see the exact limits of that city on earth. It is not coterminous with the Church; it is not completely absent from the state. It stands apart from them, yet it is manifested through them.

How do we experience peace in such a cosmos? Here I think we must read The City of God, which Merton called the autobiography of the Church, in light of Augustine’s own autobiography, The Confessions, and his important work of theology, On the Trinity.

Imagining peace begins with seeing our personalities as reflections of the Trinity.^[10] The memory corresponds to the Father. It is the storehouse of ideas, the place from where our energies and thoughts first emerge. It includes our imaginative powers. The understanding corresponds to the Son. It is the place of our intellectual powers to order, shape, arrange, see patterns, and make extrapolations. The will corresponds to the Spirit. It is our power of desire, whence come our passions and most importantly our love.

The person at peace is one who rightly sees this image within, and, by entering within herself, ascends to God and to participation in the life of the Trinity. Seeing is important. Augustine again and again returns to a biblical phrase and describes the City of God as ‘the heavenly Jerusalem’. ‘Jerusalem’ he translates as ‘vision of peace’.

That vision cannot occur without the grace of God in Christ, which sets us free from the power of concupiscence and heals our divided will so that we love God above all his creatures. When charity replaces concupiscence, we are united to our authentic selves and to others in the bond of our common creature-hood. We then know true peace.

In that experience of interiority, we know the peace of the City of God, where all are united in the beatific vision. As we behold the image of God within, we understand the right order of things and burn with love. In that sense, our imagining peace is a real participation in the eschatological peace, an experience of the not-yet-but-already. As Augustine put it in The Confessions: ‘You called and cried out to me and broke open my deafness; you scattered my blindness. You breathed fragrance. I drew in my breath and I now pant for you. I tasted and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burn for your peace’ (10:27).

3. St Catherine of Siena:
   The Peacemaker as Prophetess and Saint

When confronting Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), we are at once presented with a paradox. Supposedly an uneducated woman, she held no political office and was not related to royalty. She died when she was just 33 years old. Yet she played a major role in convincing Pope Gregory XI to move the papacy back to Rome from Avignon, where it had been very comfortably established for three-quarters of a century. She also played a significant role in establishing peace between the papacy and the league of Italian anti-papal states, headed by Florence. Adding to the paradox, 80 years after her death she was canonized and in 1970, she was declared one of the few female doctors of the Church.

Catherine’s Life

Catherine was born to a merchant class family in Siena. The primary source for knowledge of her life remains Raymond of Capua’s Life, a pious admiring biography. Even the most respected contemporary attempts by Giulianna Cavallini and Susan Noffke have no real interpretive emphasis and focus on recovering the texts of Catherine’s writing. Those writings are as close as we get to the woman behind the legend. Her biography, by contrast, has long been seen as the stuff of hagiography. As with a number of women saints of the Middle Ages, it is often impossible to separate history from legend. Cavallini’s lifework has made great progress toward establishing the original texts, but the reality still persists that Catherine is known to us through the hands of her loving disciples. Augustine, by contrast, who wrote nine-hundred years earlier, is better known, because his writings stand on their own, apart from his saintly legend.

Nevertheless, what emerges is a picture of an extraordinary woman. Catherine was born in 1347, a twin, and the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. She came into a world in which the Hundred Years War was just ten years old. Both the papacy and the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire had been weakened by decades of conflict. The urban middle class had new wealth and power buttressed by the growth of courts of law, dominated by lawyers and secular legal codes rather than by chancellors and principles of equity based on church law.

A new sense of kingly power and patriotic loyalties was emerging. France led the opposition to foreign control in church affairs, especially in the conflicts at the end of the thirteenth century between Philip the Fair, who won popular approval of his move against the pope in the Estates General and Boniface VIII, whose Unam sanctum is one of the strongest claims of papal power over civil authority ever made. The brief captivity of the pope and the election of the Frenchman, Clement V, in 1305 illustrated the dominance of the French kings over the papacy. Clement set up his court in Avignon, in the orb of French influence, but technically part of Naples, who sold it to the papacy in 1353, when Catherine was 6.

The Avignon papacy was marked by efficient administration and relative stability. The city was the equivalent of a newly created capital district, without the political strife and tensions that constantly beset Rome as the seat of a once great empire and a rival of a contentious group of Italian city-states. The papacy prospered financially under a system of taxation and user fees, which included trade in church offices, taxes on business transactions, and revenue sharing arrangements with office holders. The Italians, especially the Florentines and Sienese, found this all entirely unacceptable and constantly worked toward the restoration of the Roman papacy.

Into this world came Catherine. According to her biographer Raymond, in the same year that Naples sold Avignon to the papacy, she had a vision of Christ in pontifical vestments, sitting on a throne near the apostles Peter and Paul. Soon after that, at age 7, she took a vow of perpetual virginity and started going out to a cave in the hillsides to pray and fast in emulation of the Desert Fathers. When she was 14, she cut off her hair in resistance to her mother’s efforts to marry her off. Her mother reacted angrily and confined her to a small closet and a life of toil, in which Catherine seemed to delight. This softened her parents, who, thinking that there were twenty-four other kids to produce grandchildren anyway, relented and let her join the Sisters of St Dominic in 1363, the same year the Muslims invaded eastern Europe. This was a third order, however. She wore the black robes of the Dominicans, but continued to live at home, where she spent long periods in solitary prayer accompanied by ecstatic visions.

In 1367, at age 20, she decided that God was calling her to serve her family and her city and she began an active social ministry that included caring for the sick and poor and, most relevantly, peace-making between those famously feuding Italian families. She began to gather followers of men and women.

Legends about her relate her extraordinary gifts. In addition to her purity and dedication, her selflessness and sacrifice for the good of others, she was a wonderworker and healer. There are many accounts of her curing the sick and foretelling the future through a preternatural knowledge of events.

Her prophetic intervention extended eventually to affairs of state. She devoted herself to mending the rift between the Tuscan cities and the papacy. It involved going to Florence and making friends with the pro-papal party, traveling to Pisa and Lucca to dissuade them from joining the anti-papal league, writing letters to Gregory urging him to return to Rome, and, eventually in April of 1376, going to Avignon to meet with Gregory. Why a young girl from a family that was not working in politics would ever think of doing such a thing is not explained by her hagiographer other than to imply that she did this explicitly on God’s command.

It appears that to some extent, Gregory came to rely on her to provide a divine sign that he was doing God’s will in moving the papacy from Avignon. He asked her repeatedly what she saw. When he wavered at the last moment in September right before the massive relocation was scheduled to begin, she revealed to him a secret vow that he had made to God when elected pope. That was enough to assure him to go ahead with the move in spite of tremendous opposition from the status quo.

The Religious Imagination as a Basis for Political Vision

With Catherine we see the imagination at work in two distinct ways. One is what may be called the creation of the church-imagined legend of Catherine. The other is the imagination of the saintly woman herself. The church-imagined legend is at least partially the creation of the post-Avignon, Roman papacy. Catherine is imagined as the saint on a divine mission to return the papacy to its God-appointed home in Rome. In the longstanding battle between popes and kings, Catherine is the protector of the purity of the church.

Appropriately in her legend she is presented as supernaturally pure. She is not defiled by sex. We have already recounted stories of her early dedication to virginity from age 7. There is no adolescent fascination with members of the opposite sex, as there was with St Francis of Assisi. No ill-fated marriage, as with St Catherine of Genoa. Furthermore, she is depicted as even being pure from the defilement of food. She hardly eats, and in the last year of her short life, she lives entirely on the bread and wine of the Eucharist, prompting one recent student of hers to dub her a holy anorexic. Undefiled by the world, she is joined to Christ in her body. She receives the stigmata, in 1375, right as her intervention in papal politics begins.

These points are reinforced when we look at the imagery of her visions related in the church-imagined legend. The first vision at 6 is of Christ in papal vestments seated near Peter and Paul. It is an obvious reference to the restoration of the Roman papacy, in the city of Peter and Paul. The symbol of a strong papacy in which the pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, supreme over temporal power is presented.

The second vision comes at age 28, after receiving the stigmata. She sees the believers in the papacy and the Church and ‘unbelievers’ entering the wound in the side of Christ. The message is plain. Division in the church extends the sufferings of Christ. In her vision she is then given an olive branch and a cross, which she interprets as a command to bring both peoples together. The message is again plain: Out of the suffering of Christ, and of her suffering as a pure stigmatist joined to Christ’s body, come healing and reconciliation.

In contrast to this, the imagination of the woman Catherine is at work in the imagery of her first letter to Gregory XI. She wrote: ‘I long to see you as a productive tree planted in fertile soil and laden with sweet mellow fruit. For a tree uprooted from the soil of true self-knowledge would dry up and bear no fruit’.^[11] Here is the image of a tree planted in the soil is interesting. The soil, one would think, would be Rome. But instead, Catherine tells us the soil is ‘true self-knowledge’. An intriguing twist, one that goes to the psychological, personal, spiritual appeal of the prophetess. It is no accident that this fresh direction comes from her own writing, which is most likely more historical than the legends of her visions. She tells Gregory that he is Christ on earth, the successor of Peter, the shepherd of the flock who should not fear the political machinations of men. No appeal is made to practicality, for Avignon is practically speaking, a comfortable alternative to Rome. The appeal is to the heroic, the idealistic, to the imagination, not to practical reason. As the prophet always does, she calls Gregory to look with different eyes on the political situation and to choose an alternative that comports with true self-knowledge and faith. She asks Gregory to see himself authentically, not simply through the eyes of his courtiers.

In this sense her use of the imagination is similar to Augustine’s, in that the power to imagine becomes the ability to see the authentic self and, accordingly, to see one’s right place in the divine order. Peace is a product of that vision.

The fruits of Catherine’s Political Career

Catherine intervened in political events to bring about a specific goal. Accordingly, the effects of her peace-making efforts are open to debate on the merits. The church-imagined legend holds that the fruits of Catherine’s intervention are largely good. The Church is saved from its long captivity in Avignon, a new spiritual purity is rediscovered and peace is made with the Italian states. In fact, the record is more checkered. Opponents of Gregory’s move to Rome also enlisted prophets, one of whom warned he would meet an untimely death in Rome. He did, dying one year after returning to Rome.

The victory of the Italians over the French was short-lived. After Gregory’s death, the Cardinals elected an Italian, Urban VI. His election inspired such resentment among the French cardinals that they soon elected Robert of Geneva as Pope Clement VIII, who returned to Avignon as an alternative pope. The Great Schism had begun, with Europe divided in its allegiances between the popes. It lasted forty years, during which a third line of popes was created.

Judging Catherine as a political actor, we are left with two very different pictures: The saint, acting on God’s orders, who saved the papacy and church. Or the dupe of the sly Tuscan politicians, who manipulated the naive twenty-year old girl for their own purposes just as they had a young poet-turned-statesman, Dante Alighieri, a few decades earlier. They used her popularity and her cult of sanctity to lend the aura of divine approval to their mission to end French control of the papacy. Catherine, whose religious sincerity cannot be doubted, was in that reading the quintessential useful fool.

Judging her as she appears in her own writings, however, we see she imagined peace and spiritual health and articulated that vision with some subtlety. The appeal to the authentic spiritual self, found in the papal letters, is matched in her central work, The Dialogue. That book is a highly imaginative rendering of the soul in constant conversation with its divine lover. The prologue sets the tone:

…a soul rises up, restless with tremendous desire for God’s honor and the salvation of souls. She has for some time exercised herself in virtue and has become accustomed to dwelling in the cell of self-knowledge in order to know better God’s goodness toward her, since upon knowledge follows love. And loving, she seeks to pursue truth and clothe herself in it.^[12]

So real is that love that it brings about a desire for union with the beloved and with all creatures in the harmony of charity. Peace in the soul and in the city comes from that vision.

3: Imagination and Models of Peace-making

In closing, let us return to the question of the definition of imagination. We have seen a number of different uses of that word in the course of this study. Tracy spoke of the imagination as that power responsible for making analogies that captured similarity-in-difference and helped lead out the meaning of Chris for us in the practical situations of our lives. Augustine spoke of the imagination as a power of memory. As we remember, we image the trinity and, in that process, participate in the understanding and love of God as he works in history.

Those uses suggest two more that might help us in defining imagination. Bernard Lonergan posited that human beings, in addition to being homo religious, were also symbol-makers. Lonergan spoke of the ambiguity of pure experience and its relation to the inner experience of consciousness. For him, pure experience is the starting point in the development of self-knowledge that occurs as the result of ordering the undifferentiated mass of pure experience. Making symbols is one way that we bring order to pure experience and find self-knowledge. The process of forming symbols out of pure experience would involve, it would seem, what we have been calling imagination.^[13]

The process of symbol-making is also addressed by Mircea Eliade. He speaks of symbol making as a pre-theological experience that humans participate in to represent the ambiguity of being, even though they might lack the language to adequately convey such meanings. Theology, as a later, reflective, verbal attempt to convey meaning, struggles to express a mode of being as the coincidence of opposites. But this mode may be more easily expressed by religious symbols, for instance the Yin-Yang diagram. A symbol for Eliade has the characteristic of multivalence. It conveys a multiplicity of meanings. Its meanings are not easily exhausted. If we retain only one of its significations, declaring it to be the only or fundamental one, we risk not grasping the true message of the symbol.^[14] Symbol-making involves the imagination.

Whatever the differences among these various meanings of imagination, one thing is clear. They each convey something quite different from the colloquial understanding of the term. Webster defines imagination as ‘the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality’. ‘Imaginary’ he defines as ‘lacking factual reality’. For each of our thinkers, the imagination serves precisely to bring into our consciousness not something ‘lacking reality’ but something containing the complexity of ultimate reality. The nature of reality involves a becoming, a process of unveiling, which the power of the imagination participates in. Imagination participates in reality in some fundamental way; and men and women are organically connected to that reality through the operation of their imagination.

We have seen different models of peace-making involving different uses of the imagination: the political theorist and the prophetess-saint. In each case the believer responded to the practical political and social needs of his or her day. For Augustine it was a new role for the Church in a society where the ancient Roman order—and the security it had brought—was slowly being eroded. The Church would have to take up more and more of the functions once performed by the state and have to assume more of an active role in the dynamic process of maintaining the tranquility of order. For Catherine, the rift between the papacy and the Italian cities needed to be addressed and the independence of the papacy from secular control had to be reestablished.

The price for such involvement is high, and the more specific the intervention, the higher the cost. Catherine ran the greatest risk of being manipulated because she insisted on a certain political outcome. Her presence in Italy and early death were all that saved her from bitter criticism, given the calamities that followed Gregory’s return to Rome. Augustine has been criticized for presenting a vision of the world in which there is little point in prophetic action, given human concupiscence and the inexorable working of God in history.

But each imagined peace and brought that vision of peace into the storms of the moment. For Augustine, especially, the peace they imagined was not just a memory, not just a harkening back to an earlier, more pristine age. Augustine saw his church in the midst of an epic journey that would end only with the beatific vision. Even Catherine, whose vision was more revanchist to be sure, saw a spiritual renewal of the papacy, extricated from political machinations.

How else can a Christian make peace if not by imagining a situation different from the present and struggling to claim more of the not-yet reality of the eschaton? Christian perception of the present is in this sense always imaginative, for it sees through the lens of hope. Our glimpses of hope come most clearly from an inward vision of Christ in us, the hope of glory.

 

^[1]  My discussion of theological reflection and imagination is based on my reading of David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1987), pp. 408 ff.

 

^[2]  Before leaving this, let us ask how this use of analogy differs from another form of analogical reason that has a similar interest in praxis, namely, legal reasoning. Legal reasoning involves extensive use of analogy. In any particular case (C) the question is asked how is C the same as and how is it different from similar cases that have come before the court (A and B). Because A, B, and C are actual cases and controversies, not hypotheticals, some form of difference is virtually always present. A judge is asked to decide whether a case is mostly like or unlike another case and make his decision on that basis. In this sense, there is a difference between legal reasoning and analogical theology, because there is an effort at the bar to resolve ambiguity in favor of a practical outcome and resolution. Yet even though the decision of a court about the relationship of cases A and B to C is dispositive for the resolution of C, the tensive character of the analogies made often lives on in the progeny of a case. Each time a new case (D) arises that refers to C, the relationships among A, B, and C are reexamined and sometimes reinterpreted in the light of the current practical situation as presented in D.

What is clearly different between legal reasoning and analogical theology is that the analogies created in legal reasoning deny rather than allow ambiguity. The interaction of negations and affirmations occurs but is never acknowledged. So we would never hear the equivalent of Maximus the Confessor’s statement: ‘The perfect mind is one that through genuine faith knows in supreme ignorance the supremely unknowable’. George Berthold, ed., Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 185. Rather a court opinion usually makes it appear that the similarities between C and A and B are obvious and incontrovertible, when often they are far more ambiguous. See Edward H. Levy, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.

^[3]  Ronald G. Musto, The Catholic Peace Tradition (Mary knoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), p. 49.

 

^[4]  George Weigel, Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 26–32.

 

^[5]  R.A. Markus, Seculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 35, 42, cited in Jean Betake Elhstain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1995), p. 92.

 

^[6]  John Nevill Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s City of God, as cited in Elhstain, p. 92.

 

^[7]  Herbert Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 117.

 

^[8]  Augustine, Aurelius, St., Bp. of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, intro. Thomas Merton (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), pp. ix–xv.

 

^[9]  Elshtain, p. 100.

 

^[10]  For a longer discussion, see John Farina, Great Spiritual Masters (New York: Paulist Press, 2005), pp. 64–70.

 

^[11]  Catherine to Pope Gregory XI, Letter 54, January 1376, in Suzanne Noffke, ed. The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena, Vol. 1 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988), p. 166.

 

^[12]  Suzanne Noffke, O. P., ed., Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 25.

 

^[13] Frederick E. Crowe, ed. A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), pp. 116–118.

 

^[14]  Mircea Eliade, Polarites du symbole, Etudes Carmelitaines 39 (1960) 15–28, in Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, ed. Symbolism and the Sacred Arts (New York: Continuum, 1992, p. 5