to Paolucci, Augustine's elaboration the "classical account" of the formation of political/social organizations includes "the insight of Christian pessimism" (xiii). This means that the historical philosophical and practical strategies for organizing a stable and just civil society are arrived at by a profoundly negative example. Further, Augustine uses the positive example of preceding political theory, notably Cicero's Commonwealth, against that theory in order to make his case. Embedded in that case, as Bigongiari suggests (344), is Augustine's doctrine of predestination, which is that a happy few will attain "salvation; the rest, the great majority, are to be damned."
The state organizations of history, says Augustine, have been ultimately unsuccessful to the degree they have shown nothing so much as the inability of men to organize such a society and more, the deliberate abandonment of principles of civil organization by societies' leaders in the case of monarchies or the great mass of citizens in the case of democracies. In other words, secular, or in Paolucci's (and Augustine's) term earthly (xviii) governments have failed because they have been marked by self-interest instead of God's grace. Accordingly, it has been God's will that such civil societies would fall; that is what Paolucci means when citing Augustine's assertion that "the rise and fall of nations is governed by God's will" (xiv). Now this is so even though there may be a veneer or time period of civil stability or peace: "The one advantage that the state has is that
...