President Joe Biden, St. Augustine, and the ‘City of Man’

National Catholic Register, 22 January 2021

Biden’s inaugural address employed St. Augustine to suggest Americans’ “common objects of love” include “opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor, truth.” Missing from that list is “country.” What does it mean that Americans’ common love for their country is no longer obvious?

St. Augustine’s appearance in the inaugural address of President Joe Biden introduced an element of Catholic social teaching to the ceremony.

“Many centuries ago, Saint Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love,” Biden said. “What are the common objects we love that define us as Americans? I think I know. Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor. And, yes, the truth.”

Biden raised a key question for “social teaching.” Who belongs to the “social,” namely the “society”? 

Pope Leo XIII, father of modern Catholic social teaching, thought of societies as being groups that were united by a common mission, sharing a common good and working toward common ends. The first such society would be the family. So, too, is the Church. And there are countless other societies — schools, businesses, teams, charities — which act in their own right, subjects of their own action. Pope St. John Paul II would call this the “subjectivity of society,” namely that society as whole is made up of many societies which are acting subjects in their own right.

Pope Leo generally followed St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Augustine, writing much earlier, proposed that what organizes a society is sharing what is loved. Those “common objects of love” give rise to a common mission, and therefore a “society” as Pope Leo would express it, reading Augustine through Thomas. 

The Augustine quotation employed by Biden is from The City of God: 

If one should say, ‘a people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love,’ then it follows that to observe the character of a people we must examine the objects of its love.

So what do Americans love? Is that love sufficient for a common, unifying mission? 

Biden suggested that “common objects of love” include “opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor, truth.”

That’s a perfectly respectable word salad for the fleeting rhetoric of a political speech, but a love of “opportunity” or “respect” is not really what Augustine would understand as a “common object.” 

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