Introduction

Summary

The current volume of essays is intended to fill a gap in the scholarly literature on St. Augustine, and to point toward new and fruitful possibilities in the study of St. Augustine's political thought. Significant attention has been paid or repaid to the writings of St. Augustine over the past few decades, and much of it has been quite profitable. This can be seen in the number of volumes that have been produced over that period of time devoted to Augustine's work (and works), perhaps most recognizably in the earlier Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia and the more recent three-volume Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine. These two works combine serious study of Augustine's work with attention to the many various ways in which his writing and arguments have influenced so much of the development of Western theology and philosophy, among other fields of study. As Ernest Fortin noted a few decades ago, Augustine's works were for centuries “the arch under which philosophers and theologians had to pass, the standard by which they could expect to be judged or against which they sought to measure their achievements.”

The contributions to this volume all take as a matter of utmost importance the task of understanding St. Augustine on his own terms, by closely analyzing his textual arguments and the interplay between and among multiple works by Augustine. All of the contributors have significantly benefited from the scholarly work of Ernest Fortin, who authored dozens of essays over the course of his academic career on the thought and influence of St. Augustine. The special mark of the essays in this volume is their affinity for the fundamental concerns of Father Fortin's work—attention to the details of St. Augustine's argument, wide-ranging analysis of multiple original texts, and, most importantly, addressing the writings of St. Augustine as part of an extended conversation with ancient, medieval, and modern writers.

Attention is thus given in the essays to the fundamental works of Augustine that touch on his political teaching in many of the obvious places, especially The City of God.