MATTHEW SCHERERdemocratic politics as he engages in persuasive dialogue, imparts conviction, and seeks to
convert individuals and institutions. This is neither to justify the terms of the conversation
Rawls conducts nor the reverse; rather, it is to ask: How is it that his voice has been such
a powerful force both in stirring and in conducting this conversation? In other words, if
we take Rawls to be a saint, how can elements of belief, passion, myth, yearning, and
suffering be incorporated into the account of his doctrine’s, or of any doctrine’s, circula-
tion? If there is neither sufficient reason for this conversation nor adequate compulsion
to engage in it, how do we account for its occurrence? One could call this an investigation
into the politics of the liberal everyday, or research into the circuits between a society’s
articulation of its experience and the institutions of a society’s basic structure that condi-
tion this experience.
In what follows, I will: first, articulate the problem of miraculous events and place
Rawls’s theory of justice in connection with the social-contract tradition as articulated by
Rousseau, to indicate how a moment of political paradox originally dissolved by the hands
of God finds resolution in the miraculous works of a saint; second, holding to the criterion
that saintly or miraculous works inspire wonder, explore the captivating power of Rawls’s
saintly persona; and, finally, adducing a second criterion of saintliness, suggest how the
private dimensions of Rawls’s persona illuminate the peculiar needs and experiences the
rhetorical mechanics his texts express and appeal to.
Miracles Wrought by God’s Hand and by the Touch of a Saint.
Owing in great measure to their central importance in the life of the Christian church,
miracles, saints, and conversion have been the subject of intense disputation within the
various traditions of theological, political, and philosophical discourses throughout the
history of Western Christendom. It will not be possible to provide an historical account
of the shifting relations between these terms here, given the overwhelming complexity of
the topic, but it will be possible to indicate the barest traditional sense of them in order
to show how they will function with respect to my argument.^4 Miracles appear as disrup-
tions of the natural order that defy explanation in accord with the canons of human
reason. An interest in miracles derives in no small measure from their relation to revela-
tion, which is to say, from their power to testify to the presence of the divine. As one
reference work puts it, miracles are ‘‘events inexplicable by the operation of natural forces
and therefore regarded as manifestations of special divine activity.’’^5 But it is also in the
nature of the miraculous to be subject to contestation. Philosophical engagements, from
Spinoza’s and Hume’s on, have centered on the necessarily dubious quality of anyevidence
that can be offered for the occurrence of miracles. Political engagements, such as Hobbes’s
and Locke’s, have centered on the problem of sovereignauthoritythat is motivated by the
necessity of deciding on such dubious evidence. And the Christian gospels themselves
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