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God and the City
God and the City , based on the Aquinas Lecture delivered at the University of Dallas in 2022, aims to think about politics ontologically . In other words, it seeks to reflect on, not some
political theory or other, nor on the legitimacy of political action or the distinctiveness of particular regimes, but on the nature of political order as such, and how this order implicates the
fundamental questions of existence, those concerning man, being, and God.
Aristotle, and Aquinas after him, identified metaphysics and politics as “architectonic” sciences, since each concerns in some respect the whole of reality, of which the particular
sciences study a part. Chapter one of this book argues that, just as metaphysics, in studying being as a whole, cannot but address the question of God in some respect, so too does politics, the ordering of human life as a whole, necessarily implicate the existence of God. In this regard, the modern liberal project has deluded itself in attempting to render religion a private, rather than a genuinely political, matter. We cannot organize human existence without making some claim, whether implicitly or explicitly, about the nature of God and God’s relation to the world.
The second chapter approaches this theme from the anthropological dimension. As Plato affirmed, the “city is the soul writ large”: if man is religious by nature, he cannot be properly
understood, and the human good cannot be properly secured and fostered, if the “God question” is “bracketed out” of the properly political order. Moreover, if we fail to recognize the
essentially political dimension of relation to God, we will be unable properly to grasp the presence of God in the (ecclesial and sacramental) Body of God cannot be real in the
Church as Church unless he is also real in the city as city (and vice versa).
In his De regno , Aquinas famously affirms that “the king is to be in the kingdom what the soul is in the body and what God is in the world.” Chapter three offers a careful study of the
body-soul relationship in order to illuminate, on the one hand, the nature of political authority, and, on the other, the precise way that God is present in human community.
political theory or other, nor on the legitimacy of political action or the distinctiveness of particular regimes, but on the nature of political order as such, and how this order implicates the
fundamental questions of existence, those concerning man, being, and God.
Aristotle, and Aquinas after him, identified metaphysics and politics as “architectonic” sciences, since each concerns in some respect the whole of reality, of which the particular
sciences study a part. Chapter one of this book argues that, just as metaphysics, in studying being as a whole, cannot but address the question of God in some respect, so too does politics, the ordering of human life as a whole, necessarily implicate the existence of God. In this regard, the modern liberal project has deluded itself in attempting to render religion a private, rather than a genuinely political, matter. We cannot organize human existence without making some claim, whether implicitly or explicitly, about the nature of God and God’s relation to the world.
The second chapter approaches this theme from the anthropological dimension. As Plato affirmed, the “city is the soul writ large”: if man is religious by nature, he cannot be properly
understood, and the human good cannot be properly secured and fostered, if the “God question” is “bracketed out” of the properly political order. Moreover, if we fail to recognize the
essentially political dimension of relation to God, we will be unable properly to grasp the presence of God in the (ecclesial and sacramental) Body of God cannot be real in the
Church as Church unless he is also real in the city as city (and vice versa).
In his De regno , Aquinas famously affirms that “the king is to be in the kingdom what the soul is in the body and what God is in the world.” Chapter three offers a careful study of the
body-soul relationship in order to illuminate, on the one hand, the nature of political authority, and, on the other, the precise way that God is present in human community.
- GenresPhilosophy
215 pages, Paperback
Published November 10, 2023
5 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
About the author
D.C. Schindler
17 books66 followersProfessor David Christopher Schindler is Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America in 2001, with a dissertation on the philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He taught at Villanova University from 2001-2013, first as a teaching fellow in the Philosophy Department, and then in the Department of Humanities, where he received tenure in 2007. He received an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to do research in Munich from 2007-2008. Professor Schindler is a translator of French and German and has served as an editor of Communio: International Catholic Review since 2002.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 25, 2025
"If the Church is to communicate God’s presence in the world, it is not only to save man’s soul, but also his body. Understood as a body-soul unity, man is essentially connected to this world, and to others in this world, so that we may say that the Church exists, in part, so that the city might have life, and have it in abundance."
“If God is excluded from the political, as the realization of community, the city will be soulless. Or, in fact, because it cannot help but have a soul, as a city, it will have something like a functionalized, bureaucratized, immanentized, technologized, mechanized, and so coercively imposed, substitute for a soul. In a word, it will turn diabolical.”
“If God is excluded from the political, as the realization of community, the city will be soulless. Or, in fact, because it cannot help but have a soul, as a city, it will have something like a functionalized, bureaucratized, immanentized, technologized, mechanized, and so coercively imposed, substitute for a soul. In a word, it will turn diabolical.”
December 27, 2023
Beautiful exposition of the proper metaphysical underpinnings of politics and the City.
May 14, 2024
Very dense, but great. The metaphysical argument against liberalism (removing God from the polis) as not properly politics at all.
January 22, 2025
A lucid exposition about the nature of authority as such.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews