The Augustinian Option
Marco Rubio, Benedict XVI, & the Soul of the West
Editor’s Note: This essay has been submitted to the National Catholic Register for consideration. If accepted for publication, a link to the official version will be provided here.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent speech in Germany has quickly entered the global conversation. Addressing the Munich Security Conference, he called for civilizational renewal - sovereign nations, secure borders, industrial restoration, and a West unafraid to defend its heritage. As he put it, “The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
More than a decade earlier, also on German soil, Pope Benedict XVI stood before the Bundestag in Berlin and posed a different question: not how to defend a civilization, but what makes a civilization just. The contrast is not partisan. It is Augustinian.
Germany: The Right Place for This Debate
Germany is not an incidental backdrop. It is the most consequential laboratory of nationalism in modern history - for both extraordinary cultural achievement and catastrophic moral collapse.
This is the land that gave Europe Bach and Beethoven, Kant and Hegel, a disciplined legal culture, and a seriousness about law and reason that shaped the modern West. It is also the land that demonstrated, with devastating clarity, what happens when national destiny becomes untethered from moral truth.
The Reichstag building where Benedict spoke in 2011 once housed a Nazi regime that fused sovereignty with ideology and reduced law to will - and it later burned, fire becoming the pretext for dismantling constitutional order altogether. That history makes Germany the perfect place to revisit Augustine of Hippo’s unsettling question from The City of God (with a question Benedict quoted directly):
“Without justice - what else is the State but a great band of robbers?”
In Germany, those words are not rhetorical flourish. They are a living memory.
Augustine’s Diagnosis
Augustine wrote The City of God as the Roman world trembled. Rome had been sacked. The empire was destabilizing. Many believed that Christianity had weakened the civic spirit.
Augustine’s response was neither utopian nor nationalist. He did not promise that Rome would be restored. He did not preach withdrawal. Instead, he made a deeper claim: political communities decay when they cease to order power toward justice.
Two loves build two cities, he wrote - the love of self to the point of contempt for God, and the love of God to the point of self-gift. The earthly city is necessary. It restrains violence and builds institutions. But it is always tempted to absolutize itself and to treat survival, glory, or sovereignty as ultimate goods. That is Augustine’s enduring insight: strength detached from justice corrodes from within.
Benedict’s Warning - Largely Unheeded
In 2011, Benedict XVI returned to this Augustinian foundation in his Bundestag address, titled “The Listening Heart.” He began not with strategy but with King Solomon’s prayer for wisdom . The central political question, he argued, is not how to wield power, but how to discern right from wrong. He warned that majority rule alone is insufficient “for fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of man and of humanity is at stake.” When law becomes merely the expression of collective will, it can justify grave injustice.
In the wake of Germany’s twentieth century, this was not theoretical. It was a sober reminder that even advanced civilizations can collapse morally when they forget that law answers to something higher than power. The speech was admired. It was praised for its intellectual elegance. But it was largely treated as philosophical reflection rather than the intended civilizational alarm.
Europe continued down a path in which technocratic governance replaced moral reasoning, and legal positivism steadily hollowed out the deeper foundations Benedict described - the encounter of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome that gave the West its understanding of law and human dignity.
An Independent Witness
If this Augustinian diagnosis sounds confessional, it is worth noting that it is not made only by Catholics.
In Dominion, the author Tom Holland (a historian who has described himself as more of a cultural Christian than a believer) argues that the West’s most basic moral instincts are the fruit of Christianity. The belief that the weak possess inherent dignity, that rulers stand under moral judgment, that power must justify itself before a higher law - these are not natural inheritances of pagan antiquity, or even the secular fruits of the Enlightenment. They are the ripple effects of the “depth charges” of ancient Christianity.
Holland arrives at this conclusion not as a theologian with ecclesial loyalties, but as a scholar following the evidence of history. His work reinforces Benedict’s point: if the West forgets the Christian anthropology that shaped its understanding of justice, it does not become neutral. It becomes unmoored.
Augustine saw this and Benedict restated it. A serious study of history continues to confirm it. Marxism, in its various forms and in its insistence on interpreting history through the lens of class, has repeatedly found that power and economic analysis alone cannot secure the dignity it promises. Its record has been one of economic stagnation and the erosion of the very human dignity it claimed to defend. It is into this philosophical vacuum (where justice is contested and moral realism uncertain ) that Secretary of State Rubio now speaks.
Rubio’s Moment
Marco Rubio’s Munich speech speaks into a Europe that now feels on the brink of upheaval with demographic anxiety, migration pressures, cultural fragmentation, economic vulnerability, geopolitical instability. He insisted that “We are part of one civilization - Western civilization.” He urged allies not to accept what he called “managed decline,” declaring that “We have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”
His call for sovereignty and strength is not abstract. It reflects real concerns. As the son of Cuban immigrants who rose to become America’s chief diplomat, Rubio speaks with a personal sense of inheritance and gratitude toward Western liberty. But there is an irony at work. Rubio is responding to symptoms. Benedict warned about causes.
Had Europe more deeply absorbed Benedict’s Augustinian reminder that justice, not will, is the foundation of political legitimacy, the present moment might feel less combustible. The crisis Europe now faces (and by extension, the West) is not merely economic or demographic. It is philosophical: a crisis of moral confidence rooted in forgetfulness about the sources of its own understanding of dignity and law. Strength may indeed be necessary. But without a listening heart, it cannot be sufficient.
At stake is something even more fundamental: whether justice names something real to which nations must conform, or merely something they decide to call just. In my own work tracing the genealogical effects of nominalism on modern political imagination, this question stands at the center. If justice is no longer understood as something real (something discovered rather than declared) then sovereignty inevitably drifts toward will.
The Augustinian Option: Recovering Moral Realism
The Augustinian option is not withdrawal from public life, nor is it naive idealism. It does not deny the legitimacy of borders or the moral reality of nations. It orders them. It affirms sovereignty while denying its ultimacy. It affirms national identity while refusing to treat it as salvific. Above all, it insists that political authority stands under judgment.
Germany is the perfect place to remember this because it embodies both the brilliance and the peril of national destiny unmoored from transcendence. The West does need renewal, courage, and political seriousness. But first, it needs a listening heart.
Benedict’s warning did not expire with his passing. It echoes in the Church’s continued Augustinian wisdom, now embodied in the ministry of Pope Leo XIV, himself an Augustinian friar. The distinction between the City of God and the City of Man is not a relic of late antiquity. It is the perennial safeguard against confusing strength with justice.
The real question beneath Rubio’s speech is not whether Western civilization will survive. Instead, it is whether it will remember the moral source that once made it worth defending in the first place. That is the Augustinian option.
