God and the City
God and the City by D. C. Schindler, published by St. Augustine’s Press in 2023, presents a philosophical exploration of the relationship between politics and ontology. This 192-page book is based on the Aquinas Lecture delivered at the University of Dallas in 2022 and seeks to reflect on the nature of political order and its implications for fundamental questions regarding existence, humanity, and divinity. Schindler argues that understanding political order requires addressing the existence of God, challenging the modern liberal perspective that relegates religion to a private sphere.
Readers will find a detailed examination of how metaphysics and politics intersect, as well as an anthropological perspective on the role of religion in human life. The book discusses the necessity of considering the “God question” within political discourse, asserting that a comprehensive understanding of humanity and the common good cannot be achieved without acknowledging this dimension. Schindler’s work invites readers to reconsider the implications of political authority and the presence of God within both the ecclesial and civic realms, emphasizing that the relationship between God and the city is integral to grasping the essence of community.
Official synopsis Publisher
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 Christ: 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.
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