Elshtain, Jean. "St Augustine". Contemporary Political Theory, Vol.3, No.3 (2004): 268-274.

Elshtain, Jean. "St Augustine". Contemporary Political Theory, Vol.3, No.3 (2004): 268-274.

• St. Augustine's The City of God was written in response to contemporary critics who blamed the refusal of the Christian minority to exalt the Emperor as a God for the sack of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths. It critiques Roman notions of political and public life, and then suggests an alternative based on Christianity (268).
• For St. Augustine, the mind can never be entirely know itself, nor can we even entirely control our thoughts. Similarly, the body is not representative of the existence of the mind (269).
• In a precursor the famous declaration by Descartes, St. Augustine maintains that reflection and doubt are the characteristics of humanity are therefore prove our existence (269).
• Observing the quarrelsome nature of infants, St. Augustine writes that rather than being blank slates at the moment of birth, humans are from birth driven desires and unable to effectively express ourselves. As adults, humans retain emotional defects in thought and logic (269).
• St. Augustine notes that humans are constrained epistemologically by our frailty. Humans are correct to hold beliefs based on their personal experiences or the opinions of those that they trust, but this knowledge can never be certain or absolute. True knowledge is only the possession of the divine (270).
• Because humans are fundamentally social creatures, babies are born into a social and political context which shapes their behavior and beliefs. Furthermore, these core human desires, including the desire for power and domination, are what create the structures of the political world (270-271).
• Although human desires and natural clannishness cause war and conflict, the basic sociability of humanity underpins the ordinary peace of civic life, which St. Augustine notes has been co-opted to create regulations to regulate and prevent sinfulness (271).
• St. Augustine's primary critique of the Roman definition of public life comes from Cicero's definition of a 'republic', which is characterized by shared interests and goals. St. Augustine argues that so many interests are always at play that no truly common goals exist outside of small communities, meaning that 'republics' do not really exist (271-272).
• The concepts of peace within the City of Man and the City of God are contrasted, with peace in the City of Man only ever being fleeting and transient, because true peace can only come with the eternal City of God. That being said, humans should true to mimic the peace of heaven while on Earth (272).
• "One must rescue Augustine from those who would appropriate him to a reductionistic version of political ‘realism’ that plays down his insistence on the great virtue of hope as it is tethered to a call to enact projects of civic friendship. Politics need not reach for comprehensivity in order for it to count as a good — a limited good but a good nonetheless" (273).