Abstract

"Augustine's City of God is not a treatise of political or social philosophy." So begins Christian Tornau's section on political philosophy in his entry on Augustine for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Evident in this remark is the ambivalence with which historians of philosophy have generally treated the political philosophy of the great late antique philosopher of northern Africa. Despite its suggestive title and its extended apologetical attacks on the Earthly City, the City of God is decidedly not a work of political philosophy in the traditional sense: it does not reason about the best form of government; it only rarely functions as a mirror for Christian princes; it recommends no real social or...