The Augustinian Imperative

William Connolly stages conversations between Augustine, Nietzsche, and Foucault; conversations between late antiquity when Christianity was establishing itself as a world religion, and modernity when, with the late twentieth century fall of communism, Christianity and liberal democracy remain as unfallen titans. Connolly is not an omniscient narrator offering definitive judgements. He disagrees with aspects of the Augustinian Imperative (and its modern equivalents), such as the insistence that there isan intrinsic moral order susceptible to authoritative representation. Yet he values Augustine for drawing attention to the importance and necessity, in ethics and political life, of sensibility and interiority: in memory, forgetting, sensuality, mystery,paradox, the uncanny, reverence, and awakening. He agrees with Augustine about the importance of confession, that we in modernity also are always in a confessional mode; and like Augustine we remain haunted by the problem of the will. Connolly is heir andmajor contributor to a theologico-philosophical and postsecularist tradition, from the early Enlightenment to the present, that includes Spinoza, John Toland, David Hume, the Freud of Moses and Monotheism, and Regina Schwartz. Postsecularism recognises t