Political and social ideas of St. Augustine

For a number of years, in teaching undergraduate and graduate
courses in the history of political thought, I have found that
the problem of giving students an adequate grasp of the social
and political ideas of St. Augustine presents unusual difficulties.
In no single work by Augustine, comparable to Plato's Republic,
Aristotle's Politics, Hobbes's Leviathan, or Hegel's Rechtsphi-
losophie, can his leading ideas about man, society, and the state
be found. Nor can the student be sent to a work where Augustine
expounds his entire philosophy, including his teachings on these
subjects. He never produced a synthesis of his thought like the
Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, which contains orderly, sys-
tematic treatments of such topics as law, justice, and obedience.
The usual recourse for the teacher is to ask the student to
read Augustine's The City of God. This book, however, offers
both too much and too little; too much, because it is a very long,
discursive work, written over a period of thirteen years, which
includes a great deal of material that is of only peripheral interest
to the student of social and political ideas (e.g., the details of the
polemic against pagan religion, or the frequent, extended dis-
cussions of purely theological issues); too little, because a num-
ber of crucial aspects of Augustine's thought, such as his views
on the question of using the power of the state to punish heresy
and schism, are not treated at all, or are treated only partially.