The purpose of this research is to examine the Augustinian state. The plan of the research will be to describe the historical and cultural context in which Augustine's formulation of political structure emerged, and then to discuss this formulation as a framework for governance in general and the ability of a state to meet the standards of justice in particular.
In the background of the formulation of the Augustinian state is Fremantle's characterization of the medieval philosophical period as an age of belief. The religious frame of reference dominated the Middle Ages and even continued into the Renaissance and into humanism. Augustine's philosophy in general provides an introduction to the intellectual history of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, from Augustine to Ockham. Augustine's work in particular launches neoplatonist idealism (some of Augustine) as the dominant philosophical mode of thought reaching to the scholastic synthesis of faith and reason by Aquinas, and beyond that synthesis to Ockham's "razor," which separated purely mental conceptions from plainly physical perceptions (Fremantle passim). What has to be seen is that throughout this period, despite disputes about theology, ethics, morality, or politics to which Paolucci refers (vii-viii), there was a shared vision of the world that was predicated of the Christian and specifically Catholic tradition, yet informed by pre-Christian commentaries, particularly Plato and Aristotle.
Augustine's description of the emergence of a City of God can be taken as a political journey from primitive social association toward social organization that parallels the arrival at the collective experience of grace. However, his conception of this ideal city-state, which is really a proxy for rule of the state by the persuasive/coercive moral authority of the Church, is largely founded on an analysis of political conditions showing the extreme opposite of such rule. According ...