Christians as Political Animals: Taking the Measure of Modernity and Modern Democracy by Marc Guerra (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 328 interest in the nature of modernity and its implications for the role of religion in the twenty-first century. LARRY CHAPP DeSales University Center Valley, Pennsylvania Christians as Political Animals: Taking the Measure of Modernity and Modern Democracy. By MARC GUERRA. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2010. Pp. 216. $26.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-933859-92-7. In his engaging and thought-provoking study, Marc Guerra asks Christian citizens of liberal democracies to reflect on the political implications of their faith. Many contemporary Christian political thinkers have argued that the Christian faith finds its only legitimate political expression in liberal democracy. Taking a stand athwart this trend, Guerra argues that Christians need to reflect perennially on the relationship of their religion to political order. Christ’s teaching to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s implicitly points to the legitimacy of political life, yet leaves open the precise relationship between religion and politics among his followers. Guerra argues that Christianity is a transpolitical faith, and can make its home in a variety of political communities. Trying to settle a question that must remain open is bad for both Christianity and liberal democracy. The argument begins with an examination of Leo Strauss, who Guerra claims did more than any other twentieth-century thinker to reinvigorate interest in the theologico-political question (15). Strauss famously believed that the West was threatened by a loss of purpose stemming from a nihilism that is attendant on modern rationalism. He sought both to trace the origins of this loss and to seek an alternative. For Strauss, the fundamental question is whether human beings can acquire knowledge of the good by the unaided effort of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on divine revelation (17). For Strauss, modernity’s pursuit of absolute certainty and its efforts to overcome biblical faith sowed the seeds for the self-destruction of reason and the eventual emergence of radical historicism or nihilism (21). Turning to classical and medieval thinkers to work out of this crisis, Strauss concluded that a life of philosophical inquiry is at odds with both a life of faith and a life of moral and political virtue (28). People have to live in society because every human act and speech is directed to another. This means that people are not free to act in any way they see fit; nature imposes discernable limits on our freedom that make society both necessary and elevated (30). Yet a philosopher like Socrates judged the right ordering of the soul not on the basis of justice and nobility but on the BOOK REVIEWS 329 ground of man’s perfection as a rational being (31). For Strauss the Socratic way of life reveals the incompleteness of the moral-political horizon (32). At the same time, revelation remains for Strauss an unproven possibility. Man needs to know the whole in order to be assured that he is acting morally. Revelation gives him a glimpse into this whole and a faith that it grounds his morality. However, the possibility of revelation can be neither proven nor disproven (39), and so a life of faith and a life of inquiry are radically opposed. Guerra turns to James Schall to challenge Strauss’s account of the conflict between faith and reason. Schall argues that Strauss fails to appreciate Catholicism, a faith open to reason (43). Schall argues that the way the New Testament presents political life suggests that it is largely capable of being understood on its own terms (45). Political philosophy helps reveal the nature of human being and human excellence. Yet the account of man it brings into focus is deficient. Justice is the political virtue. Yet on its own terms, political philosophy cannot know whether justice exists by nature or by convention. Christianity addresses reason’s need for answers to its deepest practical questions by revealing that Christ is the Logos through whom the world is created. In this way, human reason is revealed as both capacious and limited. Following John Paul II, Schall believes Catholic philosophy has two aspects. The first is a...