An Augustinian Ethic of Collective Memory

This dissertation constructs an Augustinian ethic of collective memory for liberal democratic political communities—that is, it offers a framework specifying the norms, virtues, and liturgical-ethical practices for just remembrance in public life rooted in the theological and moral thought of Augustine of Hippo. Twenty-first-century North Atlantic societies are suffused with imperatives to remember demanding that political communities remember aspects of their shared past in their public, collective lives. As normative claims indexed to putative moral obligations addressed to the members of a political community, such imperatives require a kind of moral judgment from citizens as to whether they are justified. Moreover, these imperatives and the commemorative practices with which they are linked potentially participate in the functional worship of the political community or nation, which, from a Christian theological perspective, instantiates idolatry. To address these problems, this dissertation turns to Augustine, who supplies both critical resources to diagnose the logic according to which memorial practices become idolatrous and constructive resources to inform our judgments with respect to collective memory.

More specifically, this dissertation argues that latreia, which, for Augustine, designates the true worship of God, theologically grounds the “duty of just memory,” and that the norm of civic friendship specifies what this duty entails in liberal democratic political contexts. Civic friendship and what I call “hermeneutic truth” jointly provide criteria for evaluating narratives of collective memory, and the virtues of compassion and humility, which I defend as “civic virtues of remembrance,” characterize an interpretive disposition that operationalizes these criteria in public life. These virtues, I contend, are cultivated through Eucharistic participation and dispose Christian citizens toward social criticism of idolatrous collective memorial practices. Together, these claims constitute an ethic of collective memory that integrates a normative framework for the work of just remembrance with an account of how Christians can be disposed toward this work through liturgical-ethical formation.