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[Expositions 1.2 (2007) 127–140] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i2.127 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Practice and Improvise: A Christian Response to the 
Politics of Morality1

KATHLEEN RobERTS SKERRETT

Grinnell College

Over many years, American political theorist William E. Connolly has of-
fered a sustained critique of the “politics of morality.” Connolly made his 
case initially by attacking themes in the theological writings of Augustine 
of Hippo. In response to Connolly’s initial challenge, this essay promotes a 
conception of Christian ethics that reflects other Augustinian themes than 
those Connolly resisted. Drawing on the work of H. Richard Niebuhr and 
Sam Wells, I show how Christian ethicists have developed accounts of im-
provised responsibility. The essay concludes that such accounts are congru-
ent with Connolly’s vision of politics as critical pluralism based on agonistic 
respect.

For Richard R. Niebuhr

I

The pictures of responsibility that organize legal, ethical, and political 
theories are themselves of political consequence. Christian theology is 
a reservoir of such pictures, and Augustinian theology is of particular 
importance in this regard. To the extent that contemporary ethical and 
political theories envision citizens who are responsible to ideals of au-
tonomy and free choice, they throw off conceptual shadows that cast 
into darkness those persons who cannot rise to the occasions that such 
responsibility demands. Christian theologians have opposed modern 
conceptions of responsibility that disavow the imponderability of hu-
man involvement in sin. A political theory of democracy, for exam-
ple, that emphasizes interests, liberties, reasonableness, and free choice 
glides smoothly over various kinds of human indigence. Deliberative 



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democratic theory—which has gripped American political and legal 
theorists, in some version or other, for more than four decades—ap-
pears, at least from an Augustinian view, to misapprehend the beings 
it describes.

American political theorist William E. Connolly has sustained a con-
stant critique of deliberative conceptions of responsibility. Connolly 
made his case initially by attacking themes in the theological writings 
of Augustine of Hippo. For those of us who find in Augustine a searing 
image of the obsessions and lapses of an evidently unstable will, Con-
nolly’s attack may seem ironic. Augustine was uneasy with an account 
of free will as the bright lever of choice, and his uneasiness grew with 
maturity. His doctrine of original sin postulated an innate defect in the 
will, so that, while it operates as a chooser, it seems to be deprived of its 
original compass in God. Perhaps we can stipulate that “the politics of 
morality”—to use Connolly’s phrase—are indigenous to Augustinian 
terrain. Whenever we ponder the obscurity of motives, the moronic 
compulsiveness of desire, or the singe of remorse, we are on terrain 
that Augustine in some ways delimited for us. Connolly organized his 
thinking by attacking Augustinian rigor. Yet, in response to Connolly’s 
challenges, in the second part of my paper, I will promote a picture of 
improvised responsibility that draws on other Augustinian themes.

II

In 1969, Connolly aimed his “critical temper” at contemporary theo-
ries of pluralist democracy that described American politics as sustained 
competition among coherent groups, with government serving as the 
arena and/or umpire of contest and adjudication (Connolly 1969). 
This pluralist theory tended to assume or assert that citizens’ involve-
ment in competing groups enabled them to develop the personal capa-
bilities to engage in public deliberative processes. Citizens would then 
bring these capabilities into the public political forum in order to ne-
gotiate reasonable basic institutions and laws. Theorists recommended 
this picture of pluralist democracy as being more stable and less violent 
than its predominant contrast-model, which was authoritarian or to-
talitarian government.



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John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. Its huge in-
fluence would cement the terms that Connolly had adumbrated in 
1969 as the putative orthodox hermeneutics for interpreting Ameri-
can democracy. Yet Connolly had already found it imperative to dis-
rupt them. In The Terms of Political Discourse, he analyzed pluralist 
accounts of “power,” “responsibility,” and “the idea of freedom” (Con-
nolly 1974). His purpose there was to politicize these key terms in or-
der to loosen the authority of liberal contract theory over their proper 
use. Connolly has never aimed to undercut democratic pluralism, but 
rather to deepen it, to theorize it in ways that are more fitting to the 
kind of ambiguous beings we are and to the complex contingencies in 
which we live. 

In Identity/Difference (1991), Connolly’s critical temper found a new 
“contrast-model,” which he came to call “the Augustinian Imperative.” 
In writing Identity/Difference, Connolly was spurred by a thinker he 
intensely disliked, but whose intellectual and rhetorical abilities none-
theless commanded his respect. Rather than mask the intensity of his 
dislike, he explored its sources in his “Letter to Augustine,” the final 
chapter of Identity/Difference. The epistolary form allowed Connolly to 
make a direct attack. To Augustine, he wrote:

I admire your willingness to interpret the other openly from your own 
vantage point. It relieves you from the modern tendency to insinuate 
one’s deepest prejudices into charitable interpretations of the other.

 (Connolly 1991, 124)
Connolly’s interpretation of Augustine was not charitable; instead, it 
dramatized the difficulties of agonistic respect through Connolly’s self-
conscious indulgence in the temptations of enmity.

Connolly put some fierce charges to Augustine. but, in doing so, he 
wanted to expose shadow-concepts that fall alongside every theory of 
free will. In Identity/Difference, he argued that there is a persistent in-
stability in the conceptions of responsibility that Western political and 
legal theories espouse. These theories require supplementary concepts 
to catch the disturbing energies that would otherwise compromise our 
picture of ethics as fidelity to principle. So, we may observe, the free-
dom of the will must stand out against the background of original sin; 



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the categorical imperative must stand out against the opacity of pas-
sions; virtuous character must stand out against psychic abnormality; 
free choice stands out against our manipulated appetites. We cannot 
think too far in the direction of a deliberative theory of responsibility 
without coming across the need for these shadow-concepts. or rather, 
there is something inhumane about any theory that tries to eschew 
them.

For example, however much we respect legal definitions of sanity, 
there is something horrible about the incarceration of the mentally ill, 
who are competent to stand trial, but whose deterioration in prison is 
often extreme. A woman convict, in Iowa, while serving her sentence, 
has on two separate occasions gouged out each of her eyes.  A male 
prisoner in ohio opens slits in his arms and then pushes tooth-brushes 
up under the skin. These reports alone chasten one’s feeling of the 
adequacy of our criteria of responsibility. Yet the same unease can be 
raised in relation to many convicts whose choices were drowning in 
addictions, intolerable frustrations, or lifelong grief when they formed 
an intention to do a criminal act. The most unsettling criminal cases 
occur where the seam between the choices of the accused and demonic 
energies that surround them cannot be made out with any clarity.2 It is 
perhaps not so very different in the cases of those of us who manage to 
stay out of jail. We require some shadow-concept to mitigate the idea 
of mens rea as the source of our actions—to contain the baffling ener-
gies that crystallize around it.

Connolly attacked Augustine because he considered that Augustine’s 
account of human responsibility for evil called forth the shadow-con-
cept of original sin. Connolly charged further that Augustine’s belief 
that the perversion of free will must be commensurable with the bro-
kenness of the world masked Augustine’s bitterness at the real state of 
things. Augustine imagined a world responsive to human intention 
and choice. It was, in Connolly’s perspective, a fantastic denial of the 
insecure connection between our principled actions and their ultimate 
effects. Yet because Augustine believed that God is omnipotent and 
perfectly good, he could not acknowledge such insecure connections 
to be part of the fabric of creation. So, in Connolly’s view, Augustine 



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loaded responsibility for evil onto human choices. The question of 
atonement for evil, then, became acute. A human victim was required, 
a scapegoat who could bear the unbearable incommensurability be-
tween human responsibility and the extent of evil in the world. From 
Connolly’s perspective, there is no historical evidence to support the 
Christian claim that only one victim was required.

It must be said that Connolly’s critique of Augustine was primarily 
addressed to contemporary political theorists. Connolly wanted to 
show how the picture of deliberative responsibility invites citizens to 
project shadow-concepts onto others so that the responsible citizen 
who is capable of sustaining inalienable rights can be distinguished 
from minorities, addicts, aliens, prisoners, poor mothers, children, 
debtors, demoniacs, homeless, mentally ill, mentally anguished, un-
employed, uninsured, and those who have been maimed one way or 
another. These others fail to reach the requirements of citizenship of 
pluralist democracies because they cannot participate in its deliberative 
processes. Connolly argued that it is our conceptions of responsibil-
ity that work to disenfranchise these others. In Identity/Difference, he 
urged, therefore, that we conceptualize politics as the means to contest 
against deliberative pictures of responsibility.

In The Augustinian Imperative: Reflections on the Politics of Morality, 
Connolly established Augustine as the rival to Connolly’s own “criti-
cal pluralism” or “politics of generosity” (Connolly 2002a). Connolly 
conceived of agonistic generosity as “a social relation of respect for the 
opponent against whom you define yourself ” (Connolly 2002a, 155).  
He envisioned agonistic respect as a relation both more generous and 
more perilous than liberal tolerance. Such respect “cuts” deeper, Con-
nolly wrote, because it avows the “interdependence and strife” through 
which rival identities reciprocally inform and transform each other.

Connolly construed Augustine’s strategies for consolidating orthodox 
identity as the prototype of negative political differentiation. Heresies, 
he argued, are options that emerge within communities of shared faith; 
but the pursuit of these options by some of the faithful become politi-
cally threatening when they disturb “the highest hope the authoritative 
doctrine is designed to sustain” (Connolly 2002a, 78). Threatening op-



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tions within the shared faith must then be defeated. If they cannot be 
defeated, the persons who propose them must be made aversive: that 
is, they must be heaped with invective that makes their ideas seem not 
just implausible but also shameful. Connolly used Augustine’s thought 
in order to delineate the process of negative differentiation that pro-
duces identities that are rigorously responsible to truth and goodness. 
orthodox identities that are so rigorously responsible require defenses 
against those energies that persistently harass and disturb them. Para-
doxically, then, a rigorously responsible identity becomes fissured with 
habits of cruelty, incuriosity, animosity, and vindictiveness. It is an 
identity that must cope with challenges to its integrity through overt 
or covert violence.

Yet, we can observe, this picture of orthodox identities is overdrawn. 
on the contrary, there are uneven intensities to orthodox identities 
that may complicate the process of negative differentiation. The in-
tensity of a belief for orthodox identities does not depend upon its 
coherence with other beliefs, but rather on its indispensability to life. 
The beliefs that seem indispensable to one generation may be mouthed 
as enchanting formulae in another. Some beliefs are enchanting; some 
are incorporated into our practical capabilities. Indispensable beliefs 
are those that organize actual priorities one day at a time.

Connolly identified the doctrine of salvation as Augustine’s high-
est hope. but what if Augustine’s most intense beliefs were expressed 
in his practical capabilities for leadership, spiritual direction, political 
activism, and the demands of living in a religious community?  What 
if his belief in love animated the demeanor of his body with more in-
tensity than his belief in the eternal damnation of sinners? What if his 
belief in the doctrine of grace, expressed through looks and gestures, 
were more legible to his contemporaries than the doctrine of original 
sin? We would have to reconstruct the differential intensities of Augus-
tine’s beliefs by inference from the daily practices he sustained, with 
great diligence and tact, of friendship, of worship, of pastoral care, of 
prayer and confession, of prodigious correspondence with others. Such 
differential intensities make an orthodox identity dynamic, animating 
the irony and perception, for example, that informed Augustine’s own 



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political interventions in cases of capital punishment. To attend to the 
uneven intensities of belief makes conceptual room for the dynamism 
of orthodox identities, their differentiation from and responsiveness to 
the excluded others.

belief and action are never mechanically related: their connection is 
expressed more often as a form of tact than fidelity to principle. Thus, 
in responding to Connolly’s account of the Augustinian Imperative, 
I want to hold open the visceral plenitude of orthodoxy that is never 
exhausted by negative political differentiation. So below I will advance 
a picture of improvised responsibility that draws on other Augustinian 
themes, in particular, ascesis (training), faith, and grace. I organize my 
constructive remarks under the rubric: practice and improvise.

III

As we move our thinking about responsibility towards practice and 
improvisation, the texture of agency thickens and expands. It thick-
ens into what Connolly has called the “visceral register”—those so-
matic markers of perception and feeling that guide and support our 
choices. It expands into a community that conscientiously shares its 
life together. The term practice resonates, of course, with currents in 
Christian ethics, but also with Connolly’s own most recent work in 
Neuropolitics (2002b) and Pluralism (2005). The shift to practice not 
only highlights the significance of the visceral register for ethics; it al-
lows that that register can be trained through exercise. Practice involves 
our tacit avowal that freedom gathers in us, if at all, as “time in the 
incarnation of habit,” to use James Wetzel’s phrase (Wetzel 1992, 138). 
Practice takes time; or rather, practice gathers time into the visceral 
register of our being. To avow this suggests how intensities of belief can 
be unevenly energized and realized in various social or historical con-
texts. Some beliefs become the capabilities we draw upon in ordinary 
or extraordinary circumstances, whereas other beliefs release only the 
mild illumination of a fantasy, what Iris Murdoch called a “dream-like 
facility” (Murdoch 1983, 44). Practice is the way we incorporate beliefs 
into our total style of being.

A picture of improvised responsibility can draw on Christian tradi-



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tions of ascesis—without necessarily taking over invective against the 
flesh as the ubiquitous shadow-concept to spirit. The tradition of the 
desert ascetics, for example, is remarkably unruffled by the indigence 
of the will. Monks made alarming deviations from their path, but were 
restored to it with guidance that fostered more resilience than reproach. 
Responsibility in the ascetic tradition is understood to express no more 
and no less than the daily reprieve that enables a selfish man to rise to 
receive his small portion with gratitude. The ascetic tradition reduces the 
operatic complexities of the will to mundane situations of hunger, lust, 
anger, boredom, anxiety, envy, or exhaustion. It teaches ascetics to meet 
these unspectacular situations with a tender but hourly resolve. Such 
practice allows us to become acquainted with the energies that surround 
our choices—greed, grief, anger, attraction, envy, empathy—to befriend 
some of these as sources of new insight and possibility, to resist oth-
ers gently and rhythmically so that we do not inadvertently strengthen 
them through fierce struggle. Practice allows these energies to become 
familiar, to give them direction where possible, or at least to exorcise 
their fascination through the banal means of getting used to them. The 
point is to develop capabilities that we want to take on a life of their own 
at those times when we are overwhelmed by uncertainty or anguish.

To participate in liturgies of worship was a crucial practice for Augus-
tine. Liturgical traditions structure and enrich imagination; they create 
an oscillation between the practices of our personal embodiment and 
our social incorporation into the body of Christ. our participation in 
worship is a mode of submission. There is a kind of powerlessness that 
is the foundation of worship, a surrender of the self-centered noise of 
inquiry and deliberation. In liturgy, we enter into a temporally and 
viscerally saturated space and ask God to recreate life in us. We are 
immersed with others in sensory experiences, in choreographed move-
ments, in stories that are told again and again, and all of these things are 
synchronized with rhythmic turns through spaces and seasons. Liturgi-
cal practice layers belief in us through exercise in different moods and 
weather. our beliefs are apprehended in the dimensions of space and 
time, known better, with less alarm at their maverick intensities and 
enlightenments. Liturgical discipline disabuses us of the idea that free-



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dom is about spontaneous choice. Liturgy rather promotes a picture of 
freedom that entails duration and endurance. both of these entailments 
can help us bear with humility but without reactive self-loathing the 
unforeseen consequences of our responsible actions in the world.

Let me give two examples of Christian ethicists who have system-
atically developed pictures of improvised responsibility. In his 1960 
Robertson Lectures, H. Richard Niebuhr developed what he called a 
Christian ethics of responsiveness (Niebuhr 1963). Niebuhr set aside 
the predominant teleological and deontological pictures of moral man, 
urging that Christian life must have its own ethical “style.” That style 
could not be assimilated to the picture of “man-the-maker” fostered by 
teleological concepts or by “man-the-citizen” fostered by deontologi-
cal concepts. Rather, Niebuhr pictured “man-the-answerer” fostered by 
Christian faith in the sovereign and gracious God. Niebuhr offered a 
picture of improvised responsibility, where individuals must respond to 
actions upon them in anticipation of a response to their responses. Re-
sponsibility is therefore exercised in the imaginative task of interpreting 
the actions of others, and in the practical task of acting so as to welcome 
others’ responses to an action. Situations of social emergency and per-
sonal tragedy have particular weight in Niebuhr’s account. our tact is 
tested most severely where our deliberations are most uncertain.

The finest contemporary exemplification of Christian “response eth-
ics,” however, is Sam Wells’ Improvisation (Wells 2004). Wells argues 
for a picture of improvised responsibility through an extended explora-
tion of the methods of improvisational theatre companies. The picture 
he develops is always fundamentally social and ecclesial. It demands 
the imaginative responsiveness that becomes possible among individu-
als who have trained with each other to improvise on a shared narrative 
whose outcome no one controls. In an improvised drama, players make 
offers to each other in order to develop the plot that unfolds among 
them. Players can either “accept” or “block” other players’ offers. Ac-
cepting means responding to the others’ initiative in ways that enliven 
the premise of the offer and allow the story to move forward. blocking 
means refusing the premise of the offer, and preventing that particular 
unfolding. Christians, Wells avows, must strive to create communities 



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that enable people to accept all offers.
To be faithful means that the principle that imbues our respon-

siveness should be, to use Augustine’s famous phrase, “whatever is, is 
good.” To be church means forming ourselves into communities whose 
practices and liturgies enable us to respond to all offers with creative 
faith. but what then of evil offers? What about dangerous offers? In 
Christian communities, Wells observes, there are usually three kinds 
of reasons that people give for “blocking” an offer: “They tend to see 
saying ‘Yes’ as impossible, improper, or dangerous” (Wells 2004, 103). 
In such cases, Wells recommends a strategy of “overaccepting,” which 
is to say of allowing gracious imagination and response to defeat the 
premise of the evil offer.

Consider an example. After the attacks on New York and Washing-
ton in September 2001, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams 
wrote a little book called Writing in the Dust (Williams 2002). Wil-
liams personally experienced the bravery and care that ordinary people 
offered one another on that terrifying morning in Manhattan. He later 
read the accounts of phone calls that people made from the towers and 
planes to say good-bye to loved ones. He holds up for reverence these 
simple, practiced responses of love and courage that doomed people 
made in the face of anguish. Williams makes no excuse for the at-
tacks, but in his response he defeats the premise of the terrorist’s offer 
by finding the gifts that were offered in abundance in the midst of it. 
He “overaccepts,” so that the ordinary responsiveness of the victims 
becomes the meaningful offer in the story.

Practice is the rigor that gives improvisers the resilience to sustain pli-
ant moves. As Williams observes, “The hardest thing in the world is to 
know how to act so as to make the difference that can be made” (2002, 
47). Such practical knowledge is a kind of discretion that appears in 
the moment of dread. As Williams puts it:

We can cling harder and harder to the rock of our threatened identi-
ty—a choice, finally, for self-delusion over truth; or we can accept that 
we shall have no ultimate choice but to let go, and in that letting go, 
give room to what’s there around us—the sheer impression of the mo-
ment, the need of the person next to you. (2002, 59)



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We practice in order to sustain the moments of “letting go.”
Thus, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack, the dust that blanketed 

Wall Street recalled to Williams a “stray story” of Christ: Imagine a cir-
cle of righteous, angry men, with a convicted sinner at bay, and God on 
their side. “What do you say?” they ask the young rabbi, and Jesus re-
sponds: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a 
stone at her” (John 8.3–11). For a moment, those of us whose imagina-
tions are trained to these words will picture Jesus crouching down in the 
silence that follows, writing in the dust. Then one by one, the righteous 
men put down their stones and walk away (Williams 2002, 77–78).

IV

Following his earliest contest with Augustine, Connolly advocated an 
ethical-political spirituality that could challenge “the politics of moral-
ity” (Connolly 2002a, 151–58). In particular, he looked towards a pol-
itics that would be responsive, daring, and based in practices of gener-
osity and agonistic respect. If his own engagement in such politics was 
initially contra-Augustinian, that should not determine the terms in 
which we infra-Augustinians engage Connolly (Skerrett 2004). Rather, 
we turn to Augustine and the Augustinian tradition with a sense of the 
plenitude that sustains the great theologian’s interest for us. Connolly’s 
initial “harsh” reading of him can offer provocation to readings that en-
ergize efficacious beliefs around other strands of Augustine’s theology 
and discipline. but the efficacy of such beliefs comes, not from a more 
authoritative exposition, but from our whole style of ethical being. The 
rubric of practice and improvise draws on Augustinian themes: the 
priority of grace, the perversity of the will, the inscrutable depths of 
scripture, and the Church as the body of Christ. These themes move us 
away from a fundamentalist morality towards an ethical sensibility that 
responds rather than decides. In that responsiveness, there is room for 
Christians to engage a politics of critical pluralism that joins generosity 
with agonistic respect.

In a pluralist democracy, Christians can buttress pictures of delibera-
tive responsibility, or we can model practices of improvised responsi-
bility. The deliberative pictures lead frequently, if not inexorably, to the 



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failures Connolly has exposed—the need for a shadow-concept, the 
temptation to project that shadow-concept onto others, hypocrisy and 
pandering within the moral community, invective and violence against 
its outsiders, and, finally, the subliminal doubt that God is neither 
sovereign nor gracious. Further, such a picture tends to buttress those 
reactions we make to strife that merely demonstrate to ourselves our 
power in the world. They are aimed at making a righteous response, 
rather than a response that makes the difference that can be made.

Yet, insofar as the ethos of practice and improvise is properly an ec-
clesial ethics, as Wells insists, it is not perforce universal. It is not sup-
posed to be. but that does not make it any less pertinent to the poli-
tics of pluralist democracies. For, as H. Richard Niebuhr argued, the 
judgment that guides our responsiveness is not, To what principle or 
purpose are we accountable, but rather, To what community? And, for 
Niebuhr, as for Wells, Christian responsiveness must be accountable to 
“the universal society of being” encompassed in time by the promise 
of everlasting life (Niebuhr 1963, 107). So, if this style of ethics is not 
meant to be universal, it is nonetheless radically catholic.

In that regard, Wells commends the improvisational technique of 
reincorporating elements that have been let down or left behind. He 
urges that this technique is especially important to Christians. The 
technique of reincorporation incites us to envision the practical redress 
of negative political differentiation. For whatever has been disavowed, 
abandoned, or rejected as unclean must be finally reincorporated in 
the kingdom of God. Thus, a community that works to accept all of-
fers is one that will be attuned to the rejected and the outcast. It will 
look into the shadow-concepts of its pictures of responsibility in order 
to reincorporate and remake whatever rejected elements have been se-
questered there. And it will do this modestly, without extraordinary 
power, as it becomes the obvious thing to do.

To contest a rival demands that one practice and improvise the pic-
ture of responsibility one affirms. others have pointed out to me the 
dangers of “over-acceptance” in my engagement with Connolly’s attack 
on Augustine. Yet improvisation demands that we learn to discern the 
gift in the offer another makes, even in a rival offer, and so respond. 



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To act responsibly in this way means to act towards the difference that 
can be made; it is an open-ended and vulnerable pursuit. In so doing, 
though, we hope to align our responsiveness with the generosity en-
folded in Augustine’s maxim: “Love, and do what you will.”

End Notes

1. I presented an early version of this paper at the Augustine and Politics 
Conference, February 24, 2006, at Villanova University.  My thanks to Peter 
busch for inviting me to speak there, to Greg Hoskins for helping me to get 
there, and to other participants in the conference for inspiring conversations, 
especially Peter busch, Todd breyfogle, Catherine Conybeare, Eric Gregory, 
Chuck Mathewes, Fr. Tom Martin, Joseph Prud’homme and Jim Wetzel. Fun-
damentally, though, this paper reflects so much that I learned from Richard R. 
Niebuhr many years ago at Harvard Divinity School. I dedicate it to him with 
love.

2. In a 2005 Frontline program, “The New Asylums,” it is estimated that there 
are a half million people in American prisons who have been diagnosed with 
serious mental illnesses. often these people end up in maximum-security 
institutions as a result of their disciplinary infractions within the penal system. 
one of the most terrible images for me in the documentary is of “group 
therapy” in which imprisoned men, each in his own individual cage, respond 
to their earnest psychiatrist. Documentary broadcast March 21, 2006 on Iowa 
Public Television. See www.pbs.org.

3. For an account of Augustine’s political activism against capital punishment, 
see Dodaro 2005.

4. The context of this maxim is Augustine’s reflection on the proper disposition 
required to admonish others in The Rule of St. Augustine, translated in G. 
Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and His Monastic Rule, cited in Martin 2005, 182. 
Thomas F. Martin, o.S.A., argues that Augustine’s ideal vision of political 
community was set out in his monastic writings. See Martin 2005, 165–86.

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