Political and social ideas of St. Augustine
- New York Columbia University Press 1963
- 356p.
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.