What will a postmodern civic culture look like? Whatever form of civic culture, if any, finally succeeds modernist liberal civic culture, it is bound to be different in certain important respects. Some of these differences are suggested by the directions taken by postmodern liberal political philosophy — what I have called the rhetorical and teleological turns.

Consider, for example, the implications of the rhetorical turn. A political or rhetorical conception of liberal doctrine permits liberal democratic civic culture to have a name and an identity. For a rhetorical conception of liberalism, a civic culture is a countervailing culture addressed to the citizens of a liberal democracy. It is a culture that is limited with respect to its content and scope. Its purpose is to provide the citizens with the insight and motivation required for the attainment of full cultural citizenship. As such, it is a culture that should have an official public status and role of some sort. Public education, for example, should include elements of this culture as a clearly identified component of the curriculum.

Modernist metaphysical conceptions of liberalism prevented this sort of clear identification of the role and content of civic culture. Modernist liberal political theory conceived of liberal doctrine as a totalizing world view. It presented liberal moral ideals not as components of a certain historical form of civic culture, but rather as articulations of universally valid moral standards. Because modernist liberalism depended on Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge to support its universalist and essentialist claims for liberal moral ideals, the vital role of the non-cognitive or narrative dimensions of civic culture in the production of full cultural citizenship were systematically ignored. Scientific education became a surrogate for civic education. Civic education was carried on surreptitiously under different names and often identified with the modernist ideals of culture-neutral, value-free knowledge. The liberal democratic state itself was represented as having no particularistic cultural point of view at all, its culture-neutral and value-free standpoint advertised as the political analogue of the value-free objectivity of scientific knowledge.

Once the nature and political function of a liberal democratic civic culture has been clearly recognized, we should expect the content of civic culture increasingly to become an issue for public debate. Indeed, the political struggle over the definition and content of a postmodern civic culture has already begun. This struggle is evident in the so-called "culture wars" being fought in America today in virtually every area of public life. In these culture wars, the forces of progress and liberal "enlightenment" find themselves opposed by the forces representing cultural orthodoxies of all types. The progressive forces are armed with the rhetorical weapons provided by modernist liberal civic culture. On this side are those who still appeal to the modernist liberal moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy, who identify with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and who continue to advocate universalist and essentialist conceptions of civic justice. But the rhetorical weapons wielded by the forces of cultural orthodoxy have also been shaped by modernist liberal ideas. These forces appeal to traditional communitarian values of various sorts. On this side are those who oppose public use of the culture-neutral, value-free vocabulary of modernist liberalism on the grounds that it embodies a world view hostile to the moral ideals and beliefs of particularistic cultural communities. However, because they identify liberalism exclusively with comprehensive or metaphysical conceptions of liberal doctrine, the orthodox tend to speak exclusively the language of communitarian, as opposed to civic, justice. Their political and cultural agenda is anti-modernist, but all too often, also, anti-liberal.

The rhetorical turn in contemporary liberal political philosophy addresses the issues raised by this political struggle by remapping the terrain on which the culture wars are being fought, by providing a new moral vocabulary capable of defining a common ground on which the opposing sides can meet. A political or rhetorical conception of liberalism is capable of affirming fully at the same time both civic and communitarian standards of justice. It accomplishes a de-totalization of civic culture and of the liberal democratic public sphere itself. It denies the universalist and essentialist interpretations of liberal moral ideals typical of modernist metaphysical conceptions of liberal doctrine. Liberalism, thus, ceases to be identified with the scientific world view of the Enlightenment or any other totalizing world view hostile to religious belief and moral ideals. A political or rhetorical conception of liberal doctrine, in effect, makes adherents of the modernist "individualist" moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy into just one more particularistic cultural community with no special rights over the vocabulary used in public life or for purposes of civic education. On the other hand, a political or rhetorical conception of liberalism makes clear the obligation of every citizen to develop fully and exercise the capacities proper to citizenship. As we have seen, the development and exercise of these capacities, even though they pertain only to a part and not to the whole of life, nevertheless introduce certain complexities and tensions into the orthodox moral beliefs and practices proper to particularistic cultural communities. Thus, while a political or rhetorical conception of liberal doctrine breaks the connection between the liberal democratic public sphere and the rationalist world view of the Enlightenment, it also affirms the obligatory nature and the full countervailing force of the civic ideals of individual freedom and equality.

Perhaps the most significant and notable difference between modernist liberal civic culture and the postmodern form of civic culture now emerging is suggested by what I have called the teleological turn in contemporary liberalism. A postmodern, liberal democratic civic culture must provide cultural resources for motivating citizens to develop and exercise the capacities proper to full cultural citizenship. It must represent the attainment of capacities for civic freedom and civic justice not merely as a matter of obligation, but also as a matter of desire. Liberal democracy is a form of political association that presupposes the shared pursuit of a particularistic conception of the good. The peculiarity of this way of life is that the conception of the good shared by citizens of a liberal democracy is a limited good, a good applying to only a part of life, a good incapable of generating a comprehensive strategy for addressing the full range of general human life issues. As we have seen, that civic good consists in a certain liberation and affirmation of particularistic desire as particularistic desire. A postmodern liberal democratic civic culture must provide the cultural resources — discourses, narratives, representations of various sorts, etc. — capable of presenting the civic good persuasively, as a good to be desired and attained for its own sake.

This particularistic conception of the good distinguishes the general culture or civilization proper to North Atlantic liberal democracies from other regional cultures and civilizations that remain powerful and vital forces today — including the Islamic, the Japanese, the Confucian, the Hindu, the African and so on. The liberal democratic state must understand itself as the caretaker and cultivator of this particularistic Western way of life. This requires a break with all modernist liberal conceptions of the liberal democratic state as embodying a standpoint of cultural and moral neutrality. A postmodern liberal democratic state must view itself as a perfectionist regime like any other, insofar as its role is to foster the desire of its citizens to pursue a certain ideal of happiness and to the extent that any particular liberal democratic form of government or administration will be judged by its capacity to provide the conditions required for the realization of that ideal.

While it is the role of the postmodern liberal state to support a civic culture capable of motivating its citizens to pursue the civic good, the state must also acknowledge, as we have seen, that its resources are inadequate to that task. The cultural perspectives proper to the liberal democratic public sphere can provide some motivational resources supportive of the pursuit of the civic good, but the greatest part of those resources must come from an overlapping consensus among particularistic cultural communities in support of the liberal democratic moral ideals of civic freedom and civic justice. This support cannot be mandated by the liberal state. It must be generate by members of particularistic cultural communities who, acting as citizens, succeed in discovering or inventing within their own local cultural traditions motivational resources supportive of the pursuit of the civic good. This discovery or invention of motivational resources supportive of civic moral ideals will, generally, take the form of identifying independent grounds within particularistic cultural traditions supportive of the recognition and institutionalization of standards of civic justice.

For example, consider professional associations. Professional associations belong to the general category of communities based upon shared social class and occupational roles. They are associations formed to pursue collective economic goals and carry out a specific social function. Members of such associations, acting as citizens, might discover in their local traditions or organizational assumptions independent (i.e., not specifically mandated by the state) cultural justifications for the establishment of codes of ethical conduct informed by standards of civic justice — codes of ethics embodying libertarian and egalitarian ideals and requiring the development of libertarian and egalitarian attitudes. The basic goal governing all such efforts aimed at achieving an overlapping consensus is the achievement of a congruence between the communitarian standards of justice and civic standards of justice, so that praise given to a person as a member of community X (on the basis of purely local standards of justice) is to some degree consistent with praise of that same person as a good citizen.

Different cultural communities will contribute differently to this overlapping cultural consensus in support of civic moral ideals. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to consider in some detail how citizens who are members of one particular group of cultural communities might go about the process of discovery or invention that could make a uniquely powerful contribution to the motivational resources of a postmodern civic culture. I have in mind those cultural communities founded in the broadest sense on the biblical religious tradition, and specifically those communities that identify themselves as Christian.

As we have seen, modernist liberal political theory arose in part as a mediating cultural response to wars of religion. As a result, it generally regarded most forms of religious belief with some suspicion. The Enlightenment intellectuals and scholars who identified their own standpoint of cognitive objectivity with the normative standpoint of citizenship often considered religious belief to be an impediment to the development of civic attitudes and dispositions. The particularism of religious belief and moral ideals seemed opposed to the universalistic and humanistic cultural standpoint that seemed necessary to support liberal political institutions. A postmodern civic culture must reverse this pattern of suspicion and hostility to religion and learn to exploit whatever motivational resources supportive of civic moral ideals religious belief can offer. Reversal of this pattern might even be essential to the success of a postmodern civic culture, for religious belief alone can provide cultural support for civic moral ideals precisely at the point where they are most in need of support, the point at which they expose citizens to the dangers and discomforts of liberty — above all, to the dangers of nihilism and alienation. But, in reversing this pattern of suspicion, it is important to keep clearly in mind two points.

First, acknowledging that religious belief can make an important contribution to a postmodern civic culture does not entail the public endorsement of any particular form of religious belief, Christian or otherwise. It does not entail any sort of violation of the principle of the separation of church and state. The cultural perspectives proper to the liberal state and to the liberal democratic public sphere, in general, encompass only a part and not the whole of life. Christian religious community, on the other hand, is governed by a totalizing and comprehensive conception of the good. Christianity offers a world view that addresses all the general issues of human life — sex, friendship, work, suffering, sin, death, and salvation. Christian belief and moral ideals, thus, belong to a cultural sphere radically distinct from the liberal democratic public sphere, the sphere of civic culture. These two cultural spheres must not be confused. Further, Christian religious communities constitute only one group of religious communities among the many that comprise any particular liberal democracy. Christian religious belief can offer cultural resources supportive of civic moral ideals, but, in varying degrees, other forms of religious belief can do that, also. In this respect, Christianity is to be distinguished from other totalizing conceptions of the good only in view of the fact that, in North Atlantic liberal democracies, large numbers of citizens are members of Christian religious communities or are influenced by a Christian world view. In nations little influenced by Christianity, native forms of religious belief may offer lesser or greater resources for the support of civic moral ideals than Christianity, should the establishment of liberal democratic institutions ever become a real possibility in those countries.

Second, my focus on Christianity as a resource for postmodern civic culture should definitely not suggest that I am operating with any sort of essentialist conception of Christian religious faith. For present purposes, I assume a great diversity among the forms of Christian belief and practice and, for purposes of this discussion, I identify none of them as the unique embodiment of the "essence" of Christianity. I take the similarities among these diverse forms of Christian belief to be family resemblances. Moreover, I assume that, as in the case of every other sort of cultural tradition, each generation of Christians, in each Christian community, invents Christianity anew through a dialogue with the past. As each generation reinvents Christianity, the forms taken by Christian belief can be either friendly or hostile to civic moral ideals. I assume that, if Christian religious belief is actually to contribute motivational resources supportive of a postmodern civic culture, this will happen only because Christians, who are also citizens, have perceived an analogy between civic moral ideals and Christian moral ideals and, as a result, invent a Christianity that will flourish in liberal democracies because it is both and equally Christian and civic. This perception is a creative act. This perception is a call to the theological and narrative imagination. It emphatically is not a direct insight into the essential nature of Christianity because, for present purposes — i.e., for purposes of exploring the possible contribution of Christian belief to an overlapping cultural consensus — we must take Christianity as having no such essential nature.

These points understood, then, we can now ask precisely what sort of analogy might be perceived between civic and Christian moral ideals that could be exploited in the invention of a postmodern civic culture. Early modernist liberal political philosophers seized upon an analogy between the normative standpoint of citizenship and the standpoint proper to an autonomous faculty of reason, as articulated in the work of Descartes and others. This was the creative and defining moment out of which arose the Enlightenment project and modernist liberal civic culture, in general. Modernist liberals, in perceiving and developing this analogy, brought together two standpoints that had been radically distinguished by classical political philosophers — the practical, engaged standpoint of the citizen-ruler and the detached, purely contemplative or theoretical standpoint of the metaphysician. Following a similar pattern, can an analogy be perceived, today, between the normative standpoint of citizenship and the normative standpoint of Christian religious belief? If members of different Christian communities, acting both as citizens concerned about the fate of liberal democracy and as Christians concerned to enhance Christian practice in the context of an emerging postmodern culture, were to set out, today, to identify and develop such an analogy, where would they look?

Perhaps such an analogy can be discovered through an examination of what we might perceive as a certain paradoxical aspect common to the pursuit of both the civic good and the good proper to Christian life. I might formulate this paradoxical aspect as follows: both the pursuit of the civic good and the pursuit of the Christian good follow a pattern that can be expressed in the most general terms as one of attainment through abandonment. What I have in mind is that, in both cases, the object of desire consists, although in very different ways, in the adoption of a standpoint affirming particularistic human desire in general (i.e., affirming life "in this world"), but, in both cases, this object is attained through a certain abandonment of the standpoint proper to particularistic desire (i.e., the standpoint proper to "this world"). Further, we might note that this paradoxical aspect of the pursuit of both the civic good and the Christian good is linked to a special characteristic shared by both: in both cases, attainment of the object of desire itself, i.e., attainment of the standpoint affirming particularistic human desire in general (i.e., affirming life "in this world") excludes representation in narrative terms (i.e., cannot be understood as a standpoint "within time"). These two points constitute only the barest and most abstract statement of one analogy that might be perceived between Christian religious belief and a civic conception of the good. In the rest of this chapter, I will attempt to flesh out this analogy a bit, with the aim merely of providing a rough model of the sort of thinking that will be required of all citizens who wish, as members of one particularistic cultural community or another, to contribute toward the development of an overlapping consensus supportive of a postmodern civic culture.

Let us consider, first, in what sense the pursuit of the civic good can be understood to display this paradoxical pattern of attainment through abandonment. As we noted in Chapter Four, the establishment of liberal democracy as a form of political association is intended to remove constraints on human aspiration attributable to relations of cultural, social, and economic domination. However, in order to establish this form of political association, citizens must develop the capacities proper to liberal democratic citizenship, the capacities for civic freedom and civic justice. Development of these capacities requires what I characterized as a certain liberation of particularistic desire. This liberation of particularistic desire is attained through the formation of an identity that is independent of the ranking systems and the world views associated with any particularistic cultural community or conception of the good. It is the attainment of this identity or standpoint — i.e., the standpoint that provides the basis for the capacities of civic justice and civic freedom — that is desired in the desire for the civic good. Here we see the paradox. In order to establish and maintain a form of political association aimed at removing constraints on the particularistic desire produced by cultural, social, and economic domination, persons must adopt and desire to adopt a standpoint detached from every particularistic object of desire. A form of political association aimed at removing constraints on particularistic desire produced by domination is a form of political association governed by a standpoint affirming particularistic desire in general, affirming life "in this world." Attainment of this standpoint proper to this affirmation of particularistic desire in general, however, requires an abandonment of the standpoint, proper to the exclusive pursuit of any given object of particularistic desire.

This pattern of attainment through abandonment is linked to another feature of the pursuit of the civic good — the fact that the standpoint proper to civic justice and civic freedom excludes representation in narrative terms. The external and authorial standpoint proper to a capacity for civic freedom is not a standpoint that can itself be represented narratively. The pursuit of the civic good defines the liberal democratic public sphere, the space of civic discourse. But the space of civic discourse encompasses only a part of life. It does not constitute a totalizing order of meaning that comprehends all the general issues of human life. It does not constitute a "world" in the sense that particularistic conceptions of the good define totalizing views of the world. While the space of civic discourse encompasses all citizens, it encompasses all citizens only as free and equal individuals, leaving out of consideration differences and properties relevant to other life concerns — gender, wealth, talent, beauty, ethnicity, age, birth, class, and so on. Citizens create and enter the space of civic discourse motivated to attain the good proper to it, i.e., the liberation of particularistic desire. Bound together by the pursuit of this good, citizens form a limited community of a certain kind — what we can call a civic community. But this civic community is unlike the particularistic cultural communities founded upon the pursuit of a comprehensive ideal of happiness. Particularistic cultural communities are bound together by the sharing of a common history, a shared communitarian life narrative that gives meaning and direction to human desire in its totality. Particularistic cultural communities enjoy a narrative solidarity that is global, a narrative solidarity grounded upon shared stories that serve to foster and direct desire in all significant life activities and relationships. But the narrative solidarity proper to a civic community is very different.

The story of any civic community is a story of the pursuit of liberty, the civic good. It is a story about human beings as public persons, human beings who, as citizens, assign priority for the moment to their identities as free and equal individuals. To assign priority in this way to civic identity is to leave behind the distinctions, the honors, the rank, the privileges (or lack of these) attaching to communitarian identity. Communitarian identity is shaped by the ranking system, the virtue concepts, and the standards of excellence proper to a particularistic cultural community. The attributes of a person assigned on the basis of local community ranking systems reflect the totalizing world view or happiness ideal of that particular community. These attributes are incorporated into personal life narratives and, in this way, personal life narratives are incorporated within collective life narratives. The narrative solidarity that a member of a particularistic cultural community enjoys is, thus, a solidarity based upon the member’s internalization of these personal attributes, the member’s internalization of the relative position of rank and honor he or she holds within the community. To assign priority to civic identity, however, is to externalize all such personal attributes. As members of a civic community, all citizens are free and equal individuals. The honors they receive or the rank they hold within particularistic cultural communities is irrelevant. To the extent that the political community itself assigns rank and awards honor, these attributes also must remain externalized by their recipients. Any citizen who, as a citizen, views the distinctions and honors awarded by a civic community as tokens of a status higher than that of other citizens has interpreted those distinctions and honors in the wrong way.

Thus, civic identity exists only as an externalization of all attributes of rank and relative esteem. The narrative solidarity of any civic community is a solidarity based upon this externalization. The story of liberty is a story that assumes the equality of all particularistic desire. It is a story that affirms all particularistic desire equally without regard to the rank or relative esteem of those who pursue it. In short, the narrative solidarity of a civic community is not the sort of narrative solidarity that can ever give specific direction and meaning to particularistic desire. The civic identity created by the externalization of all attributes of rank and relative esteem, as noted in Chapter Four, has, at the limit, a peculiar non-narrative property. Human life-narratives are stories relating the pursuit of a particular comprehensive conception of the good life. The function of these stories is to provide intelligibility to human desire in terms of a representation of time. Human desire flourishes most abundantly in the anticipation of its satisfaction. Human life narratives define the status of desire with respect to that anticipated satisfaction. Rank, esteem, and honors granted to the main character of any particular life narrative are measures of that status. Life narratives are stories of ongoing success or failure.

But civic identity, based upon the externalization of all attributes of rank and relative esteem, can never serve as the primary identity of the main character of any life narrative. By virtue of civic identity alone, the narrative status of one person’s desire cannot be distinguished from that of any other person. Thus, at the limit, in its full development, civic identity resists life-narrative representation altogether. The civic good, in the pursuit of which civic identity is formed, consists in the liberation of particularistic desire in the name of an affirmation of particularistic desire in general. As an affirmation of particularistic desire in general, it implicitly carries an affirmation of the pursuit of life-narrative significance. Yet, the civic identity that must be given priority in the pursuit of the civic good is itself constituted by the externalization of all life-narrative significance. Thus, in attaining the standpoint from which narrative significance, in general, can be affirmed, one attains a standpoint whereby all specific narrative significance must be abandoned. Here once again, but now in terms of life-narrative representation, we see the pattern of attainment through abandonment as it is exemplified in the pursuit of the civic good.

Let us now see whether we can use this pattern in order to draw a useful analogy between the civic good and the object of Christian desire. Needless to say, the analogy will not be perfect, since we are speaking here about two very different spheres of life. The only question is whether the analogy between the normative standpoint of religious faith and the normative standpoint of citizenship can be exploited in the process of forming an overlapping cultural consensus supportive of a postmodern civic culture. The question is, then, in what sense can we understand the Christian good to involve this paradoxical pattern of attainment through abandonment, i.e., of offering a certain kind of affirmation of particularistic desire, in general, through a relinquishing of the standpoint proper to particularistic desire?

We can, perhaps, best perceive this pattern by describing in a symmetrical way the elements of both the civic good and the Christian good. The civic good consists in the liberation of particularistic desire by means of the formation of a desire for civic freedom and civic justice, a desire whose realization requires the formation of a civic identity characterized by a certain externalization of all personal life-narrative attributes derived from the pursuit of any specific particularistic good. For purposes of symmetrical comparison, we might characterize the Christian good in this way: the Christian good consists in the salvation of particularistic desire by means of the formation of a different kind of desire, a desire whose realization requires the formation of an identity characterized by the externalization of all personal life-narrative attributes derived from the pursuit of any specific particularistic good. To flesh out this comparison and to render plausible the analogy that it seeks to articulate, it will be necessary to fill in some blanks remaining in the characterization of the Christian good. We must briefly explain, (1) what it means to speak of the salvation of particularistic desire and, (2) what sort of desire is formed that might achieve this end.

(1) The salvation of particularistic desire. As I observed earlier, human desire is a form of animal desire. It is distinguished from other forms of animal desire in that, through speech, it can be given narrative representation. This fact, that human desire can be experienced in terms of a representation of time, affects desire both qualitatively and quantitatively. The narrative representation of desire constitutes an intensification of animal desire, because, to the experience of present satisfaction, can be added a representation of continued and increased future satisfaction. Narrative representation, also, constitutes a modification of animal desire to the degree that the very anticipation of continued and increased future satisfaction can become itself satisfying and can, therefore, become itself an object of desire. As a result, perhaps the most characteristic form of specifically human desire is the desire for desire itself. The state of desire is a state of both dissatisfaction and anticipation of satisfaction. The desire for desire is a desire for that state of anticipation. In other words, as I have said many times, human desire flourishes most completely not by being satisfied, but in the anticipation of satisfaction. But this characteristic form of human desire is potentially a source of danger and a point of vulnerability.

The characteristically human desire for desire invests human life in the logic of narrative representation (i.e., in the logic of "temporality"). Narrative representation serves the desire for the anticipation of desire’s satisfaction by linking events to one another in terms of a narrative closure constituted by the attainment of desire’s object. Events that are linked narratively in this way to an anticipated satisfaction gain a certain kind of narrative significance. In virtue of the very logic of narration, all narrated events are assigned narrative significance in terms of the narrative closure, the end of the story, to which they are referred. But in the case of human life narratives, events are assigned a special surplus of meaning in this way. The rhetorical function of human life narratives is to articulate the current status of desire in terms of a representation of time. The narrative significance assigned to events in a life narrative is defined by the link between those events and some desired and anticipated narrative closure. The narrative significance of events in an ongoing human life narrative articulates, in this way, the current status of desire. Events have narrative significance to the extent that they can be defined in their relevance to an anticipated satisfaction. The characteristically human desire for desire itself, thus, typically takes the form of a desire for narrative significance. To the extent that human desire takes this form, it invests itself in the logic of narrative representation. When human desire takes this form exclusively, it is captured by this logic and becomes its servant.

This condition of servitude to the logic of narrative representation is likely to affect the current status of human desire only when the narrative significance of events is threatened. Such a threat emerges when events occur or promise to occur that are incompatible with the currently anticipated closure of an ongoing life narrative. War, illness, unemployment, natural disasters — all such events can disrupt ongoing life narratives and, thus, strip life events of their current narrative significance. The paradigmatic event of this kind, of course, is death. Death is an event that marks the end of a life narrative, but an event that, in most cases, cannot be taken as a narrative closure. Events, generally, cannot receive human life-narrative significance by reference to an end of the story that is not an anticipated satisfaction. Death rarely is such an anticipated satisfaction. Death, as an event, for the most part constitutes a narrative disruption for the person suffering it, a narrative disruption that can not only strip life events of their current narrative significance, but — at the limit, given the finality of death — can destroy all narrative significance as such.

It is in the narrative encounter with the event of death, then, that, above all, makes evident the condition of the servitude of desire to the logic of narrative representation. When human desire has been captured by narrative representation, it takes, exclusively, the form of a desire for narrative significance. In the narrative encounter with death, in the encounter with death as a narrative disruption, the narrative significance of life events is threatened. To the extent that the threat is realized or seems inevitable, human desire for desire itself is threatened. If human desire flourishes most abundantly in the anticipation of satisfaction, it flourishes least abundantly not in the anticipation of the failure to attain satisfaction, but rather in the condition where no narratively representable anticipation makes sense at all. In this condition, all events and even human desire itself seem completely pointless and in vain. This is the condition invited by desire’s servitude to the logic of narrative representation.

Let us characterize this condition, to speak in a semi-religious vocabulary, as the condition of desire being captured by the things of this world, i.e., desire’s attachment to the temporal order. The temporal order is the narrative order. "This world" is the sphere of personal and collective life narratives shaped by the pursuit of particularistic desire. Particularistic desire aims at a satisfaction that can be anticipated and represented in narrative terms as a narrative closure. The goods sought by particularistic desire are the goods of this world, the goods whose pursuit gives narrative significance to the life events instrumental to their attainment. However, the servitude of desire to the logic of narrative representation constitutes a threat to particularistic desire. To the extent that desire has exclusively bound itself to narrative representation, the narrative encounter with death can cast doubt upon its validity. To the extent that particularistic desire has been captured by narrative representation, the characteristically human desire for desire can be weakened and even (at the limit) extinguished by the threat of narrative disruption. Such desire stands in need of a liberation from its condition of servitude to the temporal order. Such desire stands in need of salvation.

(2) The Christian transformation of desire. In this notion of the salvation of particularistic desire, the rough outlines of an analogy between the civic good and the Christian good can, perhaps, begin to become visible. The civic good consists in the liberation of particularistic desire for the sake of the free pursuit of particularistic desire. Affirmation of the civic good achieves its goal of liberating particularistic desire by forming a new desire, a desire that takes precedence over the pursuit of any particularistic good — namely, a desire for civic freedom and civic justice. Christian belief and practice proceed in the same way. The Christian good consists in the salvation of particularistic desire, i.e., the liberation of desire from its attachment to the temporal order, for the sake of the preservation of particularistic desire itself. Christianity achieves its goal of liberating particularistic desire from its servitude to the logic of narrative representation by forming a new desire that takes precedence over the pursuit of any particularistic good — in this case, a desire for a good that cannot be represented in narrative terms at all. We must now ask: In what way does Christianity accomplish this liberation? What is the nature of the transformation of desire fostered by Christianity? Further, how does this way of accomplishing the liberation of particularistic desire evince the pattern of attainment through abandonment?

As I noted earlier, human desire is a form of animal desire that is distinguished from other forms of animal desire by the fact that it can be experienced and rendered intelligible in terms of a representation of time. It is the very fact that human desire can be experienced in this way that gives rise to the characteristic form of human desire — namely, the desire for desire itself. The desire for desire itself is a desire for the anticipation of desire’s satisfaction. This satisfaction is represented in narrative terms as a relationship between a present event, the present moment or condition of desiring, and the event of satisfaction, represented as a narrative closure, an end of the story. This relationship defines the narrative significance of the present event or condition of desiring. In this way, the characteristic form of human animal desire consists in a sort of second-order desire — i.e., a desire not merely for a particular satisfaction, but rather for a relationship between the present state or condition of desiring and an anticipated satisfaction. This characteristic form of human desire, thus, refines and intensifies animal desire by taking a step back from the immediacy of animal desire. In this form, human desire for desire is experienced as a desire for the narrative significance of the present. Desire becomes not merely the desire of a particular satisfaction (as in the immediacy of animal desire), but rather a desire for the successful construction of a coherent and complete life narrative.

Human desire for desire, then, as the desire for narrative significance, includes within itself a representation of the present incompleteness of desire. The object of desire is the present state or condition of desiring, but understood through its relationship to its object. As we have seen, this characteristic form of human desire constitutes both a qualitative and a quantitative change in animal desire. It constitutes a qualitative change in animal desire, because the object of desire becomes the very state of anticipation of future satisfaction. It constitutes a quantitative change in animal desire, because what is desired is not only the object of satisfaction but the anticipation of that satisfaction, as well. But this characteristic form of human desire can take one further step away from the immediacy of animal desire and can experience both a quantitative and qualitative transformation in a another way. The desire for desire as a desire for the anticipation of future satisfaction has for its object the present event, state, or condition of desiring itself. But that condition is still tied to the immediacy of animal desire by virtue of its connection to some anticipated satisfaction. Such desire for desire takes for its object the present state of desiring with respect to its incompleteness and to its promise. By virtue of this incompleteness and promise, the present state of desiring possesses narrative significance. Human desire for desire, however, can become fully itself only as a desire for the present event, state, or condition of desiring, without regard to its relationship to an anticipated satisfaction. In this case, desire becomes truly and fully its own object. In this case, there is no longer a question of the incompleteness of desire or a promise of satisfaction. The satisfaction of desire is attained through the act of desiring itself. This constitutes the most radical transformation of human animal desire possible, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

When the present event, state, or condition of human desire becomes its own object in this way, human desire possesses explicitly the object possessed only implicitly as the desire for narrative significance. Human desire characteristically flourishes most abundantly not in the satisfaction of desire but in the anticipation of its satisfaction. This is because human desire is characteristically the desire for desire, the desire for the present event or condition of desiring. When this present of desire becomes the explicit object of desire, the previously open circle of human desire is closed and human desire finds its greatest and most intense completion in its present moment. Since desire, in this state, finds completion in its present moment, this moment itself can have no narrative significance whatever. An event gains narrative significance only through reference to some other event and, finally, through reference to a narrative closure. But the present moment of desire, taken as desire’s own absolute object, is referred to no other event. The completion experienced by desire in this condition cannot be represented in narrative terms at all. The present of desire’s self-completion constitutes neither beginning, middle, nor end of a story. This present is an unnarrated, dateless present, a nunc stans. Such an unnarrated, dateless present, using a more or less traditional religious or theological vocabulary, may be termed the eternal present. The order of desire to which this present belongs is the eternal order. This eternal order of desire is opposed to the temporal order, i.e., the order of narrated desire, the order of narrative significance.

Christianity fosters and mandates this transformation of desire whereby the object of desire becomes the eternal present. Let us call the desire that has been thus transformed the love of God. But such terms can be misleading. In speaking of this transformation of desire, language itself becomes increasingly strained and problematic. This is, above all, because there can be no human speech addressed to others from the standpoint of the eternal present. All human speech must take into account the elements of the rhetorical situation it addresses. Among those elements are the specific place and time of the communicative act itself. Further, all human speech offers, at least implicitly, a narrative interpretation of the rhetorical situation itself, a story of its very occasion, to its hearers for their acceptance or rejection. In these ways, human speech belongs completely to the narrative order of desire, to the temporal as opposed to the eternal order. The standpoint of the eternal present consists in an absence from this narrative order. The form of human speech native to the eternal present is, in fact, no speech at all, but rather a silence that bespeaks a completion of desire that is always already fully achieved.

Nevertheless, if Christianity is to foster the desire for this completion, it must be spoken about in some way. In Christianity, human speech about the eternal present typically adopts the vocabulary and perspectives proper to the rhetorical situation of human speech and to the narrative order of desire — the vocabulary and perspectives of "this world." The standpoint of the eternal present, the perspective proper to the eternal order of desire, thereby comes to be framed in speech as a realm absent to or beyond the temporal realm within which dwell the speakers who refer to it — it comes to be framed in speech as the world beyond this world, the "after-life." The discourse through which Christianity seeks to foster and mandate the transformation of desire, thus, becomes a discourse about this life and the next, the temporal order and the eternal order, the love of this world and the love of God. This discourse is, then, addressed to those who have encountered the threat to particularistic desire posed by an exclusive dependence upon a representation of that desire in narrative terms. In other words, Christian discourse becomes a discourse addressed to those in this world who have understood the need for the salvation of particularistic desire. This discourse seeks to affirm and preserve particularistic desire that has fallen into this condition of servitude to the temporal order by breaking the bonds of narrative representation and nurturing a desire for the unnarrated, dateless present — i.e., by nurturing the love of God and the desire for eternal life.

Keeping the import of this language clearly in view, perhaps we may now perceive more clearly and work out more fully the analogy between the pursuit of the civic good and the Christian love of God. Both liberalism and Christianity aim at a transformation of desire that serves to affirm and support the pursuit of particularistic desire or life in "this world." Liberalism does so through the establishment of a distinction between the realm of public life and the realm of private life. Persons who become citizens in the full cultural sense, in fact, develop the capacities that permit them to participate in the public realm, the space of civic discourse. These capacities for civic freedom and civic justice require citizens to form an identity that is not exclusively defined by any single personal or collective life narrative. Citizens must learn to identify themselves and others effectively in action and speech as free and equal individuals, individuals whose self-understanding is not exclusively determined by the ranking systems and virtue concepts of any particular cultural community. Citizens who have actually developed civic identities have the capacity to give priority to the civic good over the communitarian good, whenever the civic good comes into conflict with particularistic desire. They develop a love of civic freedom and civic justice. Through this transformation of desire, citizens permit the establishment of a civic community that guarantees the free pursuit of particularistic desire, that guarantees a pursuit of happiness freed from obstacles produced by interests in social and economic domination. Thus, for liberalism, the liberation of particularistic desire is achieved only to the extent that citizens subordinate its pursuit to the pursuit of the civic good.

Now Christianity, as opposed to liberalism, is a comprehensive doctrine. It constitutes a particularistic cultural conception of the good life. It offers a totalizing world view that addresses all the general issues of human life. On the other hand, Christianity, like liberalism, aims at a transformation of human desire that seeks to affirm and support the pursuit of particularistic desire. Christianity, like liberalism, does this through the establishment of a distinction between two realms of desire — in the case of Christianity, a distinction between the temporal order and the eternal order, "this world" and "the next." Christian faith, thereby, preserves and perfects human desire as the desire for desire itself. Particularistic desire can undermine itself by becoming exclusively dependent upon a narrative representation of its status. Human desire for desire then becomes exclusively a desire for narrative significance, a desire for the ongoing construction of a coherent and complete life narrative. Events incompatible with the narrative coherence of life — above all, death — can, when encountered or anticipated, strip life events of their narrative significance and, therefore, seem to deprive desire of its object.

Christianity is addressed to those whose desire has been captured by the logic of life narrative representation and who have recognized the threat to narrative coherence and, therefore, to desire itself. To save particularistic desire, Christianity fosters a different form of desire, a form of desire that supplements and transforms the desire for narrative significance and coherence. For those Christians who have attained the standpoint normative for the Christian community, this desire, a desire for the eternal present, takes precedence over the pursuit of all particularistic goods. This priority, given to the eternal order of desire over the temporal or narrative order, however, is not intended as a depreciation or disparagement of the narrative order or of "this world." Its purpose is to break the exclusive power over desire of the logic of narrative representation. The desire for the eternal present cannot replace the pursuit of particularistic goods. Human beings, as human beings, cannot live in the unnarrated, dateless present, beyond speech and beyond world. Human animal desire requires the order, meaning and direction that only a narratively coherent pursuit of particularistic goods can provide. The salvation of desire sought by Christians is a salvation of human animal desire, a salvation of the temporal order. But it is a salvation of the temporal order that can be realized only through the formation of a desire for the eternal order. Particularistic desire can be saved only through the development of a desire to be free of all particularistic desire. The desire for "this world" and its goods can be saved only by placing the love of God first.

Thus, though in different ways and with a different content, both liberalism and Christianity evince the pattern of attainment through abandonment — the affirmation and support of particularistic desire through a relinquishing of particularistic desire. Recognition of this pattern in both liberalism and Christianity by Christians who are also citizens could conceivably promote the shaping of postmodern forms of Christian belief and practice along lines that would support a new culture of citizenship. If Christian communities explicitly undertook the project of developing the analogy sketched here, Christianity could make an absolutely crucial contribution to the development of an overlapping cultural consensus that would provide the foundations of a postmodern liberal civic culture. A congruence could be established between the pursuit of the civic good and the pursuit of the Christian good, such that civic life and Christian life would mutually enlighten and reinforce one another. This certainly would not mean that the civic community would become identical to the community of Christian faith. Such an identification would, without doubt, destroy the civic community and, almost certainly, corrupt the Christian community by entangling it unduly in the affairs of this world. Yet, a Christian community formed in belief and practice with a view to the pursuit of the civic good would be a Christian community whose members would find themselves to be, as citizens, more fully Christians in their pursuit of the civic good and, as Christians, more deeply committed to the civic good in their love of God and pursuit of eternal life.

A perception of the basic analogy between the civic good and the Christian good depends on perception of the following similarities. (1) Both liberalism and Christianity seek to produce a global affirmation of particularistic human desire. (2) Both seek to accomplish this by producing a transformation of desire, so that attainment of the new object of desire involves an abandonment of the standpoint proper to particularistic desire and, thus, a modification of particularistic desire itself. (3) The standpoints proper to the new objects of desire — in the case of liberalism, the standpoint of the love of civic justice and, in the case of Christianity, the standpoint of the love of God — are standpoints that, in different ways, cannot be represented in narrative terms and require the development of identities characterized by the externalization of all narratively-defined traits.

Once again, the perception of this analogy is not the assertion of an identification of the civic good with the Christian good, an identification of the space of civic discourse with the eternal order. As in the case of all analogies or metaphors, the perception of this analogy is a creative act. It is not some sort of direct intuition of a preexisting essential relationship between liberal democratic cultural values and the values of Christianity. On the other hand, analogies, also, can transform in a profound way our understanding of the analogues. This is the sort of creative process that must occur among the members of a number of different cultural communities if a new overlapping cultural consensus, in support of liberal democratic institutions, is to be achieved. Christians (like Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.) in North Atlantic liberal democracies are, also, citizens. As citizens, it is their civic duty to identify and strengthen the resources within their own cultural tradition that support the practice of citizenship. As Christians, love of God and neighbor dictates the identification and strengthening of Christian theological, confessional, and pastoral resources that can enhance the practice of Christianity by persons who are citizens of liberal democracies. In this way, the perception and further development of this analogy between the civic good and the Christian good would support Christians in the performance of both their civic and their Christian duties. But the development of an explicitly civic form of Christianity is not only a matter of duty. The very survival of liberal democratic political institutions in the postmodern era may depend on it. Given the fact that a large majority of citizens in North Atlantic liberal democracies are Christians or, at least, strongly influenced by Christianity, it may be the case that only the emergence of an explicitly civic form of Christian belief and practice can provide the motivational support necessary for an effective postmodern civic culture.

There is good reason to believe, however, that a civic Christianity can emerge that can play this role. The analogy between the civic good and the Christian good can be extended further in many different directions. For example, let us consider briefly a possible analogy that could be developed between civic friendship and the Christian love of neighbor.

Civic friendship, first, must be clearly distinguished from a different sort of friendship: the sort of friendship that unites persons who are members of the same particularistic cultural community — persons who share a common world view and use the same primary moral vocabulary. Let us call this sort of friendship communitarian solidarity. Communities whose members are united by this kind solidarity are exclusive in a special but familiar sense. Such communities include and exclude persons on the basis of a set of criteria drawn from a particularistic conception of the good life. Qualifications for membership in particularistic cultural communities include not only specific beliefs, commitments, and behaviors, but often, also, personal traits such as birth, class, gender, talent, educational credentials, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. Consequently, built into this bond of affection is an awareness and affirmation of distinction and difference. This awareness of distinction contains an at least implicit reference to others who have been excluded. Where persons are united in communitarian solidarity, an "us" is distinguished from a "them."

This opposition between the "us" and the "them" is not just incidental to communitarian solidarity. Communitarian solidarity increases in intensity as awareness of this opposition grows. For this reason, communitarian solidarity actually seeks out ways to enhance this awareness, using means such as distinctive clothing, distinctive speech, distinctive patterns of consumption, distinctive rites of initiation and passage, and so on. This awareness of distinction necessarily involves the imposition of a certain minimal level of conformity in belief and behavior on those united in communitarian solidarity. The condition for the maintenance of the communitarian bond of affection is continued adherence to the ranking systems, the standards of excellence, and the virtue concepts of the particularistic cultural community. Any weakening of this adherence on the part of any member of the community weakens the solidarity that binds him or her to the other members.

The primary means of establishing and shaping communitarian solidarity is through the construction of collective life narratives. Such collective life narratives tell the story of how a particular community (whether consisting of lovers, family members, villagers, or persons sharing a common ethnic, class, or religious identity) came to be and where its future lies. Human bonding of all kinds, as a bonding of desire, is achieved most effectively and fundamentally through the sharing of a common story. As in the case of all life narratives, the rhetorical function of collective life narratives is to represent and render intelligible the current status of desire with respect to its satisfaction. The form of desire proper to the communitarian bond of affection is a desire for narrative significance. By constructing a common narrative representation of events, persons united in communitarian friendship reinforce one another’s readings of the narrative significance of those events. Thus, communities in the process of formation create for their members a common past and a common future. On the other hand, members of communities in the process of disintegration express that disintegration by warring over the interpretation of past events as they bear upon future prospects. Further, communities characterized by oppression of one group by another generate among the oppressed collective counter-narratives that tell a very different story of what the community has been and will be. Because collective life narratives provide the basis for communitarian solidarity among persons sharing a common life ideal, they are always stories told from the "inside" — i.e., they are always moral histories, histories whose reading of events is governed by the ranking system and virtue concepts proper to the group. A collective life narrative is written in the primary moral language of a particularistic cultural community. It assigns to actions and persons attributes of rank and relative esteem reflective of the community’s standards of excellence. Members of the community who incorporate their own personal life narratives into the larger collective life narrative of the group get their heroes and villains from these stories. Community solidarity is, thus, a bond of affection between persons who in some measure share the same heroes and villains.

Civic friendship differs radically from communitarian solidarity. The members of a liberal democracy are not united on the basis of a shared conception of the good life or a shared collective life narrative. Liberal political community is, indeed, an exclusive community, but the criteria of exclusion and inclusion applied by a civic community are not defined by the possession of shared personal traits as evaluated by some particularistic cultural ranking system. Criteria for membership in a civic community are defined constitutionally, without regard to the differentiating biological, economic, and cultural properties of its members. The citizens of a liberal democracy are defined constitutionally as free and equal individuals. The friendship proper to citizens must be a friendship proper to free and equal individuals, a friendship that disregards, for the purposes of civic friendship, personal traits that are evaluated differently by different local ranking systems.

This fact gives to civic friendship a certain appearance of paradox. Communitarian solidarity is built out of an awareness of distinction. Where communitarian solidarity exists, an "us" is opposed to a "them." But in the case of civic friendship, the bond of affection is built out of an awareness of a very different sort of distinction. This distinction cannot, in principle, be understood properly as an opposition of an "us" to a "them." The "us" defined by the bond of civility embraces, at least potentially, all human beings. Citizens united in friendship, as citizens, are united as free and equal individuals, precisely in their difference from all those differences in personal traits, values, and beliefs that define the criteria for membership in particularistic cultural communities. Civic friendship is a bond of affection effective between persons precisely to the extent that those persons do not distinguish themselves from one another on the basis of the biological, economic, and cultural properties that are fundamental to communitarian solidarity. Thus, civility also bases itself on a distinction between sameness and difference, but the affirmation of sameness in civic friendship is really an affirmation of difference in two respects: (1) an affirmation of difference in world view, values, and personal traits and (2) an affirmation of the difference of both self and other from all such differences — i.e., an affirmation of the freedom of self and other as citizens.

Civic friendship, then, is a very complex and peculiar phenomenon. Communitarian solidarity creates and nurtures the awareness of biological, economic, and cultural differences distinguishing those who belong to a given community from those who do not. As an affirmation of difference, communitarian solidarity consists in a relatively straightforward affirmation of the difference of self from other. On the one side stands the "us," on the other side, the "them." Communitarian solidarity flourishes where members of a given particularistic cultural community perceive in one another an exclusive identification with the "us" as opposed to a "them." But the impulse behind civic friendship is very different. Civic friendship follows a logic very different from that of communitarian solidarity, because civic friendship is a bond uniting those who pursue the civic good. Civic friendship flourishes where members of a civic community perceive in one another an identification with and commitment to the civic good. The civic good is to be distinguished from the communitarian good in that the civic good is a partial good. Its pursuit does not comprehend the whole of life. The civic good consists in the liberation of particularistic desire. Those who pursue the civic good do not abandon their commitment or allegiance to a particular cultural community. Rather, pursuit of the civic good seeks only a modification of that commitment — a modification whereby it becomes a commitment undertaken in full freedom and responsibility. Those who are united in civic friendship wish for one another the attainment and exercise of this capacity for freedom and responsibility.

Civic friendship is thus a bond of affection between free and responsible individuals who are and wish to be freely committed to a particularistic way of life or ideal of happiness. Civic friendship nurtures the capacity for free and responsible choice. It does this by establishing a bond of affection between persons that is not based upon similarities of biological, economic, or cultural traits. Civility establishes a sameness, an equivalence between persons, that lies beyond all such differences. One citizen, in behaving civilly toward another — i.e., in affirming this equivalence — affirms his or her own civic identity as one that is not exclusively determined by any particularistic ranking system or world view. Citizens united by civic friendship are the same, precisely insofar as they grant to themselves and to one another the possibility of being different. Their unity is constituted by an affirmation of their difference from all particular differences that determine particularistic community identifications. Accordingly, the mark of civility is not a wish to change others, to make them conform more completely to the requirements of some particularistic ranking system. Nor is the mark of civility a mere willingness to live and let live, a tolerance bordering on indifference to the other. Rather, the mark of civic friendship is an affection that actively grants to the other an open space for the free play of desire, an active affirmation both of mutual difference and of an identity beyond all differences.

Thus, while communitarian solidarity thrives where there exists an identity of interests and tastes, civic friendship is libertarian, empowering otherness and difference. While communitarian solidarity thrives where there exist shared measures of excellence and personal worth, civic friendship is egalitarian, establishing a bond that disregards all measures of relative rank and merit. Given their very different logics, civic friendship and communitarian solidarity coexist uneasily with one another. In a civic community, persons are expected to develop and exercise equally a capacity for both — another example of the extraordinary cultural demands made upon those who live under liberal democratic regimes. Just as liberal democracy, in general, requires citizens to be both committed to a particular way of life and detached from it sufficiently to exercise the capacities of civic freedom and civic justice, so also liberal democracy requires citizens to cultivate solidarity with the members of their family and their ethnic, class, and religious communities, while, at the same time, cultivating a bond of civility with those who pursue very different and even conflicting life ideals. The difficulties involved in the realization of this ideal of the equal cultivation of both communitarian solidarity and civic friendship are enormous.

The cultivation of civic friendship can very often seem actively hostile to the cultivation of communitarian solidarity. Communitarian solidarity supports the pursuit of a particularistic conception of the good life. It seeks to nurture and perfect in fellow community members those attitudes, dispositions, and skills necessary for the attainment of a particularistic ideal of happiness. The mark of communitarian solidarity is, thus, a desire, and even a commitment, to change others, to help them to conform more completely to the highest standards of the community. In order to flourish, human desire needs such direction. The nurture and direction of particularistic desire very often requires a strong assertion of authority and a demand for exclusive compliance with a specific ranking system. Communitarian solidarity has for this reason a certain priority in relation to civic friendship. In contexts where clear and firm direction is most needed — say, in family relationships, in education, in economic, partisan political or religious affairs — the libertarian nature of civic friendship, its affirmation and nurturing of difference, can express personal disengagement and even a positive indifference to others.

The civic good, we must recall, is a partial and not a comprehensive good. The free space granted to others by civic friendship in pursuit of the civic good cannot encompass the whole of life. Just as civic identity exists only as a modification of communitarian identity, so also civic friendship exists only as a modification of communitarian solidarity. The very possibility of civic friendship, therefore, depends upon strong communitarian identity. Citizens who are not firmly anchored in communitarian solidarity will neither understand nor appreciate the practice of civility. Accordingly, the affirmation of otherness and difference proper to civility is inappropriate when it has the effect of undermining the ordered and disciplined pursuit of a particularistic ideal of happiness. The practice of civility as a civic virtue, then, requires moral insight. It requires a prudence guided by a clear understanding of the good which civility serves.

Cultivation of civic friendship also can have the effect of weakening the narrative foundations of communitarian solidarity. Communitarian solidarity is forged and maintained by the sharing of a collective life narrative. The rhetorical function of collective life narratives is to create a bond between the members of a given cultural community, a bond that supports the pursuit of a particularistic conception of the good life. Civic friendship is also forged and maintained by the sharing of a common narrative, but the rhetorical function of this civic narrative is quite different. The story of a civic community is the story of the pursuit of the civic good, the pursuit of civic freedom and civic justice. But the desire for the civic good is not a desire for a comprehensive good that can give direction and meaning to life as a whole. The story of liberty is a story that affirms the pursuit of particularistic desire in general and affirms all particularistic desire equally, without regard to any specific ranking system or world view. A citizen identifies with the story of liberty to the extent that he or she externalizes all attributes of rank or relative esteem gained by identification with the collective life narrative of any particularistic cultural community. This identification with the story of liberty is perfected by what I have called the practice of life-narrational equalization.

Civic friendship is a bond of affection based upon this equalization of all particularistic desire and this externalization of all attributes of local rank and status. But a developed capacity for this equalization and externalization of rank can have a corrosive effect upon belief in the collective life narratives of particularistic cultural communities. Affirmation of the community life narrative of a civic community, in effect, requires a certain relativization of local collective life narratives. It requires that these local collective life narratives be placed in the context of an encompassing narrative that equalizes all particularistic desire and represents the histories of all particularistic cultural communities, as it were, from the outside. Yet the narrative of the civic community is a moral history. It tells the story of the struggle for, and defense of, civic freedom and civic justice. It has its heroes and villains.

It is important to see, however, that genuinely civic heroes, unlike the partisan heroes proper to communitarian moral histories, are heroes precisely to the extent that their actions have affirmed the equalization of all particularistic desire and the externalization of all local measures of rank and relative esteem. Such heroes do not serve well as models for shaping of particularistic desire and aspiration over the course of an entire life. They offer no specific direction beyond that of an affirmation of individual liberty to choose and follow a particular ideal of happiness. Thus, the narrative requirements of civic friendship, here, come into conflict with the narrative requirements of communitarian solidarity. This conflict is not inevitable, but its proper mediation requires, once again, a moral insight informed by a clear understanding of the end served by civic friendship. When civility is cultivated without the guidance of such insight, the affirmation of otherness and difference proper to civic friendship, its libertarian and egalitarian nature, can actually make citizens even more vulnerable to the cultural dangers endemic to liberal democracy — the dangers of nihilism and alienation.

Christians, like all citizens of liberal democracies, are called upon to cultivate both civic friendship and communitarian solidarity. They are, therefore, called upon to develop the moral insight or prudence required for the full and proper development of both. As citizens, it is the civic duty of Christians to locate within their own cultural tradition resources supportive of a liberal democratic civic culture. As I have shown earlier in this chapter, the potential resources of that tradition for such a purpose are vast. Another case of this might be noted in the congruence between civic friendship and the Christian love of neighbor. Let me point out a few general parallels.

Christian love of neighbor, however greatly it may differ from civic friendship, is paradoxical in many of the same ways. To see the similarity, we must remember that liberal democracy requires persons to move within two very different moral contexts, contexts that stand in a relation of tension with one another: the sphere of local community life and the liberal democratic public sphere. Participation in the public sphere, in the space of civic discourse, requires a kind of abandonment or surrender of the standpoint proper to membership in a particularistic cultural community. Liberal democracy requires citizens to develop and cultivate a standpoint and an identity proper to civic life, one that involves a significant modification of communitarian identity. The development and cultivation of civic identity includes, among other things, the cultivation of a capacity for civic friendship, a friendship uniting all citizens without regard to their diverse and conflicting communitarian commitments and interests. But a cultivation of this civic bond of affection can be disruptive to relationships of communitarian solidarity, because the libertarian and egalitarian nature of civic friendship can seem incompatible with the exclusivist and rank-sensitive nature of communitarian friendship.

Christianity draws distinctions and imposes responsibilities similar to these. Like citizens of liberal democracies, Christians also belong to two worlds — the world of temporal affairs, or the City of Man, and the world of eternal things, or the City of God. Full membership in the City of God, like full, liberal democratic cultural citizenship, requires a relinquishing of the standpoint proper to particularistic desire. Like citizens of liberal democracies, citizens of the City of God must develop and cultivate a new standpoint and an identity — in the case of Christianity, a standpoint distinct from and even alien to identities and roles adopted within the sphere of temporal affairs. Like liberal democratic citizens, Christians, as citizens of the "heavenly" City, must also cultivate a new kind of friendship — in the case of Christianity, a kind of friendship that is alien to the communitarian solidarity that unites members of the City of Man. This friendship that unites the citizens of the City of God is Christian love of neighbor or charity. Further, just as civic friendship and communitarian solidarity coexist uneasily, so, also, the Christian love of neighbor introduces tension and ambiguity into the communitarian relationships proper to the City of Man. Let us now fill in a few details of this comparison in an attempt to show precisely how the Christian love of neighbor might become a vital element of a postmodern civic culture that supports the cultivation of civic friendship.

We must keep clearly in view the fact that, within the civil order, the Christian community constitutes one cultural community among others. As a particular cultural community united by a shared conception of the good life, the Christian community has all the general features of every other such community. Christianity is a comprehensive doctrine that addresses (at the limit) all the general issues of human life. It offers to its adherents a totalizing world view that encompasses human life in its entirety. Moreover, the Christian community is embodied in institutions with different types and various degrees of organization. These institutions — Christian churches — have a variety of functions beyond their strictly religious function. They are political organizations, advancing the political interests of Christians as Christians within the encompassing civil order. They are welfare organizations, satisfying the material, psychological, and social needs of Christians. They are economic organizations, often owning property, buying and selling goods, raising and spending money in pursuit of various other goals. They are educational institutions, teaching their members not only about Christian faith, but also offering them information, narratives, and arguments relating to current issues of concern to all citizens. As political, welfare, economic, and educational organizations, Christian churches generate institutional structures not unlike those of non-religious organizations. Organizational activities must be initiated and managed. Some minimally hierarchical system of responsibility must be established to direct and oversee such activities.

As political, welfare, economic, and educational organizations, Christian churches create their own distinctive and separate cultural identity within the larger society. They constitute more or less exclusive particularistic cultural communities, and their members are necessarily united by an awareness of their differences from members of other such communities. Governed by this awareness of difference, Christian churches generate their own forms of communitarian solidarity. They generate their own local cultures — their own ranking systems, styles of speech and dress, rites of initiation and passage, preferences in entertainment and leisure activities, and so on. But the Christian community, understood in this way as a community united by communitarian solidarity, an institutionally organized association serving many different purposes, is not yet understood with respect to what makes it a specifically Christian community. In the vocabulary of theology, the Christian community, understood as a community united in communitarian solidarity, belongs to this world, the world of temporal affairs, the City of Man. Christian churches, as political, welfare, economic, and educational institutions, constitute the visible church, the church that stands organizationally distinct from all other forms of association found within the encompassing civil order. However, what unites Christians specifically as Christians is not a form of communitarian solidarity. To the extent that persons who are members of Christian churches have developed and cultivated a specifically Christian understanding of who they are and what their lives are about, they are united in a different way. The bond of affection that unites Christians as Christians is the bond of charity, the Christian love of neighbor. How does charity differ from all forms of communitarian solidarity?

Whatever other pursuits may unite Christians in communitarian solidarity, the pursuit that unites them specifically as Christians is the pursuit of the Christian good, the love of God. As we have seen, the love of God consists in that transformation of human desire that Christianity seeks to accomplish in its adherents. Christian faith seeks the salvation of particularistic desire. Human desire characteristically takes the form of the desire for desire or the desire for narrative significance. But the desire for narrative significance in human life is vulnerable to a variety of obstacles and frustrations. As we have seen, to the extent that human desire is exclusively bound to the logic of narrative representation, those obstacles and frustrations pose a threat to the affirmation of particularistic desire itself. One obstacle in particular — death — appears to constitute an insuperable narrative disruption that along seems to be sufficient to destroy the narrative coherence and significance of a human life. In order to overcome this appearance and to save particularistic human desire from this apparent threat of defeat, human desire must be freed of its bondage to the logic of narrative representation. The problem is not death, but this bondage. As we have seen, what is desired in the desire for narrative significance is the desire for desire itself, the closing of the circle of desire that escapes all narrative representation utterly. Christianity seeks to foster a kind of desire for desire that escapes its bondage to narrative representation and that closes the circle of desire. This desire is the desire for the unnarrated and dateless present, the desire for the eternal present, the love of God. Members of Christian churches, whose desire for desire has been successfully transformed in this way, are united by their shared love of God. The bond of affection by which such Christians are united is charity.

This specifically Christian form of fellowship differs from communitarian solidarity in many of the same ways that civic friendship differs from communitarian solidarity. Christians who are actually united in the love of God, the desire for the eternal present, are united in a different way than when they are joined in communitarian solidarity. United in charity, they are citizens of the City of God. United in communitarian solidarity, they are citizens of the City of Man. United in communitarian solidarity, Christians are members of the visible church, an institutionally organized association that is distinct and seeks to be distinct from other kinds of association. Members of the visible church know who numbers among them and who does not. The visible church has public criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Members of the visible church actively differentiate themselves from members of other religious communities as a means of strengthening their communitarian bond.

This awareness of difference and distinction introduces pressures for conformity and submission to authority into Christian forms of communitarian solidarity, as it does into all forms of communitarian solidarity. But charity follows a different logic. Charity follows a libertarian and egalitarian logic similar to that of civic friendship. Charity is libertarian, i.e., affirms and empowers otherness and difference, and egalitarian, i.e., establishes a bond that disregards all measures of relative rank and merit, by virtue of the good that it serves and attains. Christians are united in charity through their shared love of God. But the love of God is a love for the eternal present that releases human desire from its bondage to the logic of narrative representation. This transformation of desire produces, (1) a transformation of identity and of (2) a transformation of desire that are the sources of the libertarian and egalitarian nature of specifically Christian friendship.

(1) Christians who have fully attained the standpoint of faith, the standpoint proper to the love of God, gain an identity that is no longer defined by any particular personal life narrative. The standpoint of completed desire, the standpoint of the eternal present, is dateless and not subject to narration. The personal identity that is shaped by a particular life narrative is formed by the narrative internalization of personal traits and attributes of rank assigned through a process of comparison with others. This narrated personal identity is defined by a reading of life events that distinguishes a person in terms of biological and economic properties, goals, interests, and achievements. A person thus defined becomes the central character in the ongoing construction of his or her personal life narrative.

In attaining the standpoint of faith, however, the Christian gains an identity that is different from any narrated identity, an identity that cannot be defined or expressed in narrative terms. In the standpoint of completed desire, the object of desire is always already fully possessed. The identity proper to this standpoint, thus, cannot in principle be understood as one belonging to a character undergoing a process of life narrative construction, a character on the way to some specific narrative closure. As a result, the differentiations and distinctions that define any narratively-constructed identity fall into irrelevance. In the Christian love of neighbor, persons are united on the basis of the sharing of an identity that stands beyond all differences and distinctions subject to narrative representation. This includes, at the extreme, even those differences produced by injurious and hostile actions. The Christian love of neighbor, thus, encompasses (at the limit) even the love of enemies. Of course, who is loved in the love of enemies is not the other as enemy, for the characterization of actions as injurious and hostile belongs to the sphere of narrative representation. In the Christian love of neighbor, even the enemy becomes neighbor as the entire sphere of narrative representation itself falls into the oblivion of the eternal present.

(2) Further, the Christian love of God and neighbor transforms not only personal identity, but particularistic desire as well. The Christian good is the salvation of particularistic desire. Christian faith achieves this not by the denial or disparagement of particularistic desire, but rather by freeing it from its bondage to the logic of narrative representation. The Christian love of God fulfills human desire for desire by transforming it completely into itself as the desire for the unnarrated and dateless present. But no human life could ever be lived wholly within an unnarrated and dateless present. In human life, contemplation of the eternal present, the silencing of the narrative imagination, is inevitably an affair of the moment. Human beings are living things whose desire is distinctively qualified by the human power of narrative representation. The love of God closes the circle of desire momentarily not in order to close it permanently, but rather in order to permit this momentary completion of desire to liberate particularistic desire from the constraints of an exclusively narrative self-understanding.

This liberation of particularistic desire abolishes, permanently, any appearance that desire can remain incomplete as a result of events that disrupt the construction of coherent personal life narratives. The power of death, as one such event, is, thereby, overcome. The result of this liberation of particularistic desire from bondage to the logic of narrative representation is a global affirmation of the narrative significance of human life in the face of all narrative disruptions. In the vocabulary of Christian faith, this global affirmation of narrative significance is the theological virtue of hope. In any case, this global affirmation of narrative significance is an affirmation not of any particular life narrative pattern, but rather of any and all life narrative patterns. In short, this affirmation entails an equalization of particularistic desire, an equal affirmation of every human project of constructing a coherent personal life narrative. Therefore, the Christian love of neighbor, as a bond of affection between persons based upon an identity beyond all differences, is also a bond of affection that embraces equally every life in its particularity.

Thus comes into view, clearly, the intrinsically libertarian and egalitarian nature of Christian charity. Christian love of neighbor is libertarian because it imposes no conformity and requires no submission to authority. Charity flourishes there where differences are greatest — even at the point of the most extreme difference, in the Christian love of those who hate Christianity. Further, Christian love of neighbor is egalitarian, because the Christian salvation of particularistic desire is a salvation of narrative significance in general, without regard to the particular life project or to the person who undertakes it. Thus, once again we see a possible congruence between the pursuit of the civic good and the pursuit of the Christian good, between Christian charity and civic friendship. If guided by this perception of congruence, those who attain fully the standpoint of faith and who practice the Christian love of neighbor will find the practice of civic freedom and civic justice an inevitable and natural extension of their Christian way of life. In fact, if this analogy between Christian charity and civic friendship is plausible at all, Christian charity is bound to appear as an even more radical, extreme, and demanding form of civic friendship than that required by liberal democracy itself. The friendship of citizens of the City of God might then be viewed as the fulfillment of that bond of affection realized in civic friendship only as promise.

We may press this analogy between civic friendship and Christian charity one step further, a step that reveals what may be the most important contribution Christianity can make to the invention of a postmodern civic culture. We have noted the way in which libertarian and egalitarian civic friendship stands in a relationship of tension with communitarian solidarity. Communitarian solidarity is a vital force in the shaping and direction of human desire. Communitarian friendship nurtures and supports human aspiration by grounding it in collective life narratives that provide models of human achievement and success. But the equalization of all particularistic desire that is affirmed in civic friendship seems to involve a certain relativization of all models of achievement and lead to a general debunking of heroes. In other words, the egalitarian character of civic friendship can seem to promote a general disaffection from all particular ranking systems, a disaffection that, at the extreme, becomes full-blown nihilism.

Further, the sort of collective narrative that supports civic friendship, i.e., the narrative of the liberal political community’s quest for civic freedom and civic justice, is not the sort of narrative that can give human desire specific direction. In the narrative identification with the story of liberty, a citizen must adopt a narrative standpoint external to the particular collective life narrative that frames his or her own personal life narrative. The cultivation of this narrative standpoint that looks at all local collective life narratives from the outside, so to speak, is necessary for the development of a capacity for civic friendship. But it can also promote a skepticism toward every community narrative that is presented with moral or inspirational intent. Such skepticism can, in turn, promote a generalized disengagement from the particular cultural communities whose members are motivated by these local moral histories. In other words, the libertarian character of civic friendship can foster a detachment from community life that, at the limit, can become full-blown alienation. In this way, the cultural resources required to support civic friendship seem to conflict with the cultural resources required to support communitarian solidarity. The citizen’s civic duty to cultivate equally both civility and communitarian solidarity can thus seem to be self-defeating, to require the development and reconciliation of hopelessly contradictory and mutually undermining normative standpoints.

The Christian love of neighbor coexists with communitarian solidarity no more comfortably than does civic friendship. The libertarian and egalitarian nature of Christian charity, however, gives rise to different tensions for different reasons. As we have seen, Christian love of neighbor also affirms the equality of all particularistic desire. The proper Christian response to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" is "Anyone at all." But the Christian community is, also, a particularistic cultural community among others with its own identity and organizational structure. The members of the Christian community are united in communitarian solidarity as they carry out the political, welfare, economic, and educational tasks that constitute part of the mission of Christian churches. Christianity, in order to survive as a doctrine and way of life, must create organized and institutionalized forms of association, forms of association that cannot flourish in the absence of communitarian solidarity. But Christian love of neighbor is the affirmation of an identity among persons that lies beyond all differences of community membership and local culture. Communitarian solidarity, on the other hand, is based precisely on an affirmation and cultivation of such differences. It, then, would seem that the communitarian solidarity necessary for the survival of Christian churches stands in hopeless conflict with the highest ideals of the Christian love of neighbor.

Further, Christian love of neighbor is libertarian in a way that could promote, at the limit, the abandonment of community membership entirely. Christian charity is the bond of affection that unites persons in their pursuit of the Christian good, the love of God. As we have seen, the love of God releases human desire from its bondage to the logic of narrative representation. The love of God consists in a transformation of human desire for desire, such that desire receives its perfect completion as the desire for the unnarratable, dateless present. This standpoint of the eternal present provides the Christian with a radically new identity, an identity wholly stripped of all those personal properties that define the main character of any particular personal life narrative. The Christian love of God realizes the most extreme liberation of human self-understanding from the constraints of narrative representation.

For the Christian, this unnarratable identity becomes the "real" or preferred self. Christian love of neighbor is the recognition and affirmation of either the actuality or potentiality of such a "real" self in all other persons, at all times and in all places. But such an unnarrated self must always be juxtaposed with a narratable identity. Human beings are living things whose desire is subject to narrative representation. It is as narratively representable selves that human being speak and interact with one another. It is as narratively representable selves that human beings organize community life and enjoy communitarian solidarity. But the Christian love of neighbor seems to require a turning away from narratively representable selfhood and association. The Christian love of neighbor seems to follow a logic that leads toward a radical separation of the City of God from the City of Man. It would seem to promote an otherworldliness utterly inhospitable to involvement in temporal affairs and participation in the life of any particularistic community. Thus, like civic friendship, Christian love of neighbor seems to stand in a very uneasy relationship to communitarian solidarity, potentially generating its own unique forms of disaffection from particularistic desire and alienation from particularistic community life.

The chance that these forms of disaffection and alienation might be actualized among Christians, however, is greatly reduced by the nature of the collective narrative that unites the Christian community. The collective narrative of the Christian community, the narrative into which every Christian incorporates his or her personal life narrative, is grounded in the narratives contained in the Bible. The narratives are accorded extraordinary status. This extraordinary status attributed to them gives the collective narrative of the Christian community its power to hold together Christian love of neighbor and communitarian solidarity in a mutually supportive and creative tension. For Christians who are also citizens, this synthesis of charity and communitarian friendship made possible by biblical narrative could provide, in the context of a postmodern civic culture, a model for an analogous synthesis of civic friendship and communitarian solidarity. A clear articulation of this analogy, by an explicitly civic Christian theology, could, perhaps, have the effect of limiting, for Christians and those citizens influenced by Christianity, the risks of nihilism and alienation endemic to libertarian and egalitarian civic friendship. Given the fact that the great majority of citizens in North Atlantic liberal democracies are, at least, nominal Christians, such a civic theology could make a significant contribution to the creation of a viable postmodern civic culture. It would provide a resource for the motivation of civic virtue that could, perhaps, be developed in no other way. Let me briefly sketch here, in conclusion, the outlines of a postmodern civic theology that might accomplish this.

The capacity of the Christian community to unite Christian charity and communitarian solidarity into a creative synthesis hinges on the extraordinary status Christianity accords to the biblical narrative. In the vocabulary of theology and faith, biblical narratives constitute revealed or divinely inspired truth. The import of this description is to affirm that the narratives contained in the Bible are not subject to the standards applied to stories told by human beings. In order to understand the rhetorical function of this extraordinary status accorded to biblical narrative by Christians, we must briefly consider, once again, the variety of rhetorical functions served by narratives in general.

As we have noted, stories told by human beings may be divided into two different kinds: closed-criterion narratives, i.e., stories whose narrative closure is fixed and predetermined, and open-criterion narratives, i.e., stories whose narrative closure is not fixed, stories whose narrative order is therefore always subject to revision. In any narrative, the order and significance of the events described are determined by their relationship to the end of the story. The end of the story, the narrative closure, serves as the criterion for determining narrative order and significance. Stories told by human beings most typically are closed-criterion narratives. During a trial, for example, stories are told as part of the presentation of evidence. The criterion of relevance that determines the narrative order and significance assigned to events in these stories is the question, "Guilty or innocent?" On other occasions and with respect to other criteria of relevance, many different stories could be and always are constructed out of the very "same" events described in witness narratives. This, of course, does not mean that the narrative of a crime, finally constructed by a jury when it arrives at its verdict, is somehow fabricated or false. As long as there is consensus regarding the narrative criterion to be applied in constructing a story, there can be consensus about the order and narrative significance of the events described by the story. Storytelling has many different rhetorical functions. Human beings tell stories to entertain, to inform, to explain, to warn, to give advice, to command, and so on. Whenever a story performs its rhetorical function successfully for a given audience, it is because the story was constructed artfully and in accordance with a narrative criterion acceptable to its audience.

Literary or fictional narratives constitute one special class of closed-criterion narratives. An understanding of the way in which fictional narratives differ from "historical" narratives is important for an understanding of the extraordinary status accorded to biblical narrative in Christianity. Fictional or literary narratives differ from "historical" narratives in that the events related by fictional narratives are invented. When a person constructs a story about events that actually occurred, i.e., that the person did not deliberately invent or imagine, he or she imposes a narrative order on those events that is only one possible narrative order among others. It is always possible to construct other stories about, or to impose a different narrative order on, those events for different purposes and different audiences. Thus, historical events, such as the Battle of Waterloo or the assassination of Lincoln, can be woven into any number of different stories and given any number of different narrative interpretations. However, in the case of fictional or literary narratives, it makes no sense to incorporate the events described into different stories, to impose a new narrative order on them. The narrative order and significance of the events described in a fictional or literary narrative are fixed, once and for all, because they are a matter of decision for its author. The author determines the narrative closure to which all the events described refer. Once the end of the story is known to its audience, the events it relates are understood in their narrative order and significance with finality.

Keeping this difference between fictional/literary and historical narratives clearly in view, we must recall one further point before returning to the question of the extraordinary status of biblical narrative. Human life narratives, both personal and collective, differ from both historical and literary narratives. Human life narratives describe events that have actually occurred. In that respect, they are like any historical narrative. Many different stories can be constructed out of the events occurring during a particular person’s life. But human life narratives differ from historical narratives by virtue of their special rhetorical function. As we have seen, human life narratives serve to provide meaning and direction to human desire. To construct a life narrative is to construct a life. A person relates the story of his or her life to others (including self as other) in order to render intelligible and to assess the current status of desire with respect to its satisfaction. By virtue of having this function, human life narratives belong to the class of open-criterion narratives. In their function of providing meaning and direction to human desire, human life narratives are never finished. The order and significance of human life events always depend upon the future, i.e., depend upon events that have not yet occurred, and, therefore, are subject to nearly infinite reassessment and reinterpretation in terms of different possible narrative closures. Where the end of the story is always not yet finally determined, the narrative order and significance of events are, also, always not yet finally determined.

When persons do construct their own life narratives as if they were closed-criterion narratives, imposing a fixed narrative order and meaning on their lives, they often do this because their life narrative has become bound up with some malady of desire. To construct a human life narrative as if it were a closed-criterion narrative — as if the end of the story were fixed and the narrative significance of particular events were determined with finality — is to construct a human life as if it were a work of fiction. The fictionalizing of human life narratives is always motivated in some way. For example, when persons have done or experienced something that would, if incorporated into their acknowledged life narrative, disrupt or threaten the narrative significance of their lives as a whole, then those events are either excluded from the narrative (i.e., "repressed") or arbitrarily given a significance that consists in a denial of the significance that they threaten to have. The function of psychoanalysis, understood as a "talking cure", is the de-fictionalization of life narrative meaning. Only because such fictionalization is bound up with a malady of desire can the de-fictionalization of life narrative meaning constitute a cure for that malady. To de-fictionalize a personal life narrative is to incorporate into that life narrative events excluded or denied because they were too disruptive of narrative coherence and significance. Such a cure always amounts to a restoration of the proper rhetorical function to human life narratives, the function of rendering intelligible and assessing the current status of desire with regard to its satisfaction. Persons who are cured of maladies of desire in this way can once again take up the construction of their own life narratives in freedom as open-criterion narratives, as narratives that are indefinitely revisable.

Finally, biblical narratives also have the character of life narratives — they, together, constitute the basis for the collective life narrative of the Christian community. Just as the civic community is united by a collective life narrative whose theme is the pursuit of civic freedom and civic justice, so, also, the Christian community is united by a collective life narrative whose beginnings and narrative foundations are offered in the Bible. If the collective life narrative of the civic community is the story of liberty, then the collective life narrative of the Christian community, whose basis lies in biblical narrative, is the story of salvation, the story of the attainment and full possession of the Christian good. Like all collective life narratives, the rhetorical function of the Christian collective life narrative is to give meaning and direction to a collective pursuit of the good. But the Christian collective life narrative, by virtue of possessing characteristics of both historical and literary narratives, differs significantly from the collective life narratives of other communities. The collective life narrative of the civic community tells a story of the quest for political liberty. It begins with certain events — political reforms or revolution, for example — and tells a story of continuing struggle for civic freedom and civic justice that anticipates victory but includes, also, the possibility of failure. On the other hand, the Christian collective life narrative encompasses the whole of historical time and tells a story of the pursuit of a good whose final and perfect attainment can never be in doubt because the divine author of the story has already decided upon its narrative closure, i.e., the salvation of all those who accept this story in faith.

It is the blending of these three narrative properties that constitutes the extraordinary status accorded to biblical narrative by the Christian community. To say that the narratives of the Bible are divinely inspired or constitute revealed truth is to say that those narratives define with finality the narrative order and significance of the historical events they describe because they are "authored" by one who knows and who has decided upon the end of the story — the end of the story of salvation. God, as the ultimate author of scriptural narrative, knows the end of the story because God, in the biblical tradition, is defined as the ruler of history, the ultimate author who determines the narrative significance of all actually occurring events from the beginning of time until the end. God, as the ruler of history, as the inventor of the final narrative significance of all historical events, foresees and foreknows the end of story. In foreseeing the end, God provides narrative order and meaning to all historical events. The narrative order God provides constitutes the providential order — the story that describes the totality of historical events in their intrinsic narrative significance as a story whose narrative closure is the salvation of all particularistic desire.

Of course, even though the providential order encompasses all narratively representable events, this does not mean that Christians can claim to possess a privileged knowledge of the meaning of historical events beyond those described in the Bible. The narratives contained in the Bible offer Christians their only authoritative access to the narrative order willed by God, the Divine Plan, the "real story." The narratives of the Bible reveal or open a window upon the story that is written into the very fabric of things. Beyond the events described in biblical narratives, however, the details of the Divine Plan, the final narrative significance of historical events, must remain forever hidden from those who live through them. The affirmation of the "revealed" or "divinely inspired" character of the biblical narratives, therefore, constitutes an affirmation that such a Divine Plan exists, that all events do, in fact, have a preordained and final narrative significance, even though Christians can have no final or authoritative knowledge of it.

Perhaps now, with these points in view, it is possible to understand how this conception of the providential order of history can ground a collective life narrative that enables the Christian community to reconcile the love of God, the desire for the eternal present, with an affirmation of particularistic desire and communitarian solidarity. The collective life narrative that unites Christians encompasses historical events in their entirety, i.e., encompasses the entire sphere of narrative representation. Christians who, in faith, accept the narratives of the Bible as a revelation of the Divine Plan affirm, also, that the Divine Plan encompasses their own lives, as well. Even though Christians do not and cannot have any privileged insight into the final narrative significance of events occurring in their own lives, they can, nevertheless, affirm that there is, indeed, a Divine Plan working itself out in their own lives, and that they are constructing a personal life narrative that has already been written into the universal story of salvation by the very author of that story.

By incorporating their own personal life narratives into this collective life narrative of the Christian community, Christians are given cultural support for a twofold affirmation of the temporal order and of particularistic desire. First, since every event that occurs belongs to the story of salvation willed by its author, no event can disrupt the final narrative coherence of human life and, thereby, threaten to strip human life of its narrative significance. Natural catastrophes, unemployment, illness, death — events that can threaten to disrupt and even destroy the narrative coherence of human life unsupported by the Christian collective life narrative — can be affirmed in their narrative significance by being written into the collective story of human salvation. In the vocabulary of faith, regardless of what events occur to threaten the desire for narrative significance, nothing occurs without God willing it, as part of an overall Divine Plan for salvation, a Divine Plan that guarantees the narrative significance of all human life events. Second, since the providential order embraces all historical events, even the most apparently insignificant, every event of a Christian’s life can be viewed as a manifestation of the Divine Plan. This means that the Christian can conform to the Divine Plan and, thus, affirm the narrative significance of events whatever may be his or her particular life circumstances. In the vocabulary of faith, God’s narrative will for particular persons is to be detected in the particular events and choices that are decisive for their lives.

This twofold affirmation of narrative significance and particularistic desire, when it is effective in a particular life, can mediate and reconcile the conflict between Christian love of neighbor and Christian communitarian solidarity. As we noted earlier, the Christian love of God and neighbor can create a certain kind of disaffection from particularistic community life and from the goals sought by particularistic desire itself. Christian love of neighbor is an affirmation of an identity with the neighbor that lies beyond all differences of culture and personal traits. Christian love of God is a desire for the eternal present that stands essentially beyond all possibilities of narration. In both of these ways, Christian love of God and neighbor tends to pull those persons governed by it away from the particular narratable circumstances of their lives. It can create an "otherworldliness" that seems to entail a generalized rejection of the sphere of narratively representable events, the realm of temporal affairs. But the collective life narrative of the Christian community, the conception of history as a providential order whose narrative significance is determined by God alone, operates as a countervailing force in Christian life to prevent all disaffection from the narrative order and from the goals of particularistic desire.

When Christians read their own personal life narratives into the narrative framework of the providential order of history, the temporal order and particularistic desire are saved in a special sense. Particularistic desire is saved most fundamentally by the transformation of desire by which human desire for desire becomes the desire for the eternal present. But particularistic desire is saved in this secondary sense by its narrative incorporation into the order of providence. God, as the author of the story of salvation, determines the narrative order and significance of events by reference to an end of the story — the end of time — that is already known. Faith in God’s providence, faith in God’s knowledge of the narrative closure of all history mirrors within the realm of temporal affairs the closing of the circle of desire achieved through the unnarratable love of the eternal present. In this way, by the affirmation of God’s providential role in history, historical events themselves gain their meaning by reference to this eternal present. Particularistic desire is permitted to flourish in full confidence that no human aspiration is foreign to the love of God and that the love of God is most fully realized in the providentially directed service of human aspiration.

Christians whose self-understanding has been shaped by this conception of the providential order of history could conceivably draw a parallel between this Christian conception of history and the liberal democratic collective life narrative. As we have noted, the representation of history as the story of liberty also introduces a tension into the relationship between civic friendship and communitarian solidarity. The demands of citizenship, too, can create an alienation and disaffection from the pursuit of particularistic conceptions of the good. However, the collective life narrative of the liberal democratic community offers no specific remedy for this. Left to the resources of the story of liberty alone, citizens seem faced with a choice between a commitment to libertarian and egalitarian civic values and commitment to the hierarchical values of communitarian solidarity. The civic affirmation of the equality of all particularistic desire seems to undermine the narrative intelligibility of desire itself. The civic affirmation of difference and otherness seems to call into question the validity of human goals and aspirations. The demand that citizens cultivate both civic friendship and communitarian solidarity thus makes liberal democratic civic culture continuously vulnerable to the threats of alienation and nihilism.

It may be possible for Christians who are also citizens to neutralize these threats, at least among Christians, and, thus, to close this gap between civic and communitarian virtue by appeal to elements of the Christian collective life narrative. In such an appeal, an explicit parallel would be drawn between the Christian love of neighbor and civic friendship. The libertarian and egalitarian nature of the Christian love of neighbor would be articulated in its analogy to the libertarian and egalitarian nature of civic friendship. The practice of civic friendship by Christians would then be viewed as not only consistent with, but even demanded by Christian charity. In the same way, this parallel would inform the practice of civic friendship, keeping clearly in focus those attributes of civic friendship that liken it to the Christian love of neighbor. Once this analogy has been recognized, the cultural resources offered by the Christian collective life narrative could then support, at least for Christians, an overcoming of the tensions between civic friendship and communitarian solidarity, in the same way that they support an overcoming of the tensions between Christian charity and communitarian solidarity.

The Christian collective life narrative supports both the unnarratable love of God and neighbor and the commitment to the narrative significance of participation in the life of particularistic cultural communities. It accomplishes this synthesis by its affirmation of the temporal order, the order of narrative representation, as the providential order, an order in which the narrative significance of events is determined, finally, by the will of God. As we have seen, Christian faith requires an abandonment of the standpoint of particularistic desire for the sake of the salvation of particularistic desire. The Christian affirmation of the temporal order as the providential order, in effect, transforms the Christian abandonment of the standpoint of particularistic desire into a commitment to and affirmation of all human aspiration. In faith and guided by the love of God, the desire for the eternal present, Christians submit to God’s providential or narrative will for them by serving human aspiration in the particularistic communities and in the particular historical circumstances where God has placed them. In this way, the most perfect liberation of desire from the logic of narrative representation becomes identified with the most perfect service of narratable human aspiration.

For Christians, this conception of the providential order could also provide the cultural basis for a synthesis of civic and communitarian virtue. The pursuit of the civic good also requires a certain abandonment of the standpoint of particularistic desire for the sake of the liberation of particularistic desire. As we have seen, it is this requirement that introduces tension into the relationship between civic friendship and communitarian solidarity. For Christians guided by a recognition of the parallels between Christian love of neighbor and civic friendship, however, these tensions between civic friendship and communitarian solidarity can come to be viewed simply as a special case of the tensions produced by the intersection of the eternal and the temporal orders of human desire. Christians, as Christians, understand their eternal destiny to be bound up with the providentially assigned historical circumstances of their lives. Christians, as citizens, can understand in the same way that the practice of civic virtue and civic friendship is to be identified not merely with active participation in the political sphere, but also with active participation in the life of particularistic cultural communities. Christians, as Christians, understand that the love of God, the desire for the eternal present, is to be achieved most perfectly not through a withdrawal from temporal affairs, but rather through an abandonment to the providential will of God, realized in service to others at a particular time and place. Christians, as citizens, can understand, in the same way, that love of civic freedom and civic justice can be fully exercised not only in the political sphere, but also through the progressive "civilization" — i.e., the progressive realization of the civic values of liberty and equality — within particularistic hierarchical and exclusive cultural communities.

A Christian community shaped by this analogy between the Christian good and the civic good, between the Christian love of neighbor and civic friendship, would provide immense support for the cultivation of civic virtue in the emerging postmodern era. Given the numbers and the influence of Christian communities, it is, in fact, difficult to imagine a viable and effective postmodern civic culture without this support. In order to shape an explicitly civic form of Christianity, a new civic theology is required, a theology dedicated to the persuasive articulation of the parallels between the love of civic justice and the love of God. But a Christian community shaped by such a theology could, also, serve as the model for all other cultural communities party to the overlapping consensus required to support liberal political institutions. All the particularistic cultural communities that comprise particular liberal democracies stand under a similar civic obligation. Each such community must identify within its own cultural traditions resources that encourage its members to cultivate capacities for civic freedom and civic justice. Communities without such a commitment will effectively exclude their members from participation in liberal democratic political life. Every such community that refuses or fails in this commitment will, with all certainty, contribute to the failure of the institutions of liberty bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment.