al texts of Greece and Rome, as well as with Christian and non-Christian religious factions that grew up in the Mediterranean, Europe, and Asia Minor in the post-apostolic period, Augustine could speak with some authority about both non-Christian and Christian lines of thought. Three of his texts are the most influential: the Confessions, The City of God, and On Christian Doctrine. An account of these various lines of thought, and Augustine's decision for Christianity, is provided in the Confessions. Partly to offer an alternative analysis of civil society to Cicero's Commonwealth, Augustine elaborates City of God, which is not only an essay in political organization but also a moral journey from pre-Christian ignorance to a community distinguished by the collective experience of grace and the preeminence of the persuasive/coercive moral authority of the Church. According to Paolucci, Augustine's elaboration the "classical account" of the formation of political/social organizations includes "the insight of Christian pessimism," or a response to a profoundly negative example of found civil society. Augustine disposes of details of religious belief per se and answers doctrinal ambiguities with reference to authoritative Christian texts, in On Christian Doctrine.
Augustine's analysis of Judaism is connected to his God-concept, his Christology, his personal experience of faith, and to a method of theology that obliges. What is important in the Augustinian texts is the totalistic discourse, a systemic and systematic application of a Christian perspective to the project of interpreting the cosmos and the divine agency of Creation, the Redemption, and salvation. This entails a project of interpreting secular and religious intellectual traditions that compete with Christianity with a view toward marginalizing them and while asserting the moral and intellectual preeminence of orthodox institutional Christianity in contrast to them. For the m...