Thank you so much. I want to offer a defense of political Augustinianism, but I do not mean by that

term the sort of Augustinianism in politics that is perhaps most familiar in the United States.

In America, when one claims to be Augustinian in political matters, it most often means that one espouses

a kind of political pessimism of the sort propagated by Reinhold Niebuhr.

Man is so infected by sin that all his common projects end up turning out badly,

and so one can't expect very much from politics.

That is not what I will be defending.

Rather, what I will be defending is the view that temporal authority can be just

when it recognizes that temporal ends are not the highest

ends and when it therefore subordinates itself to spiritual authority such that it attains

temporal ends in such a way that they serve spiritual ends.

In other words, I will be defending Catholic integralism.

This is the view taught in late antiquity by popes such as St. Chalaisius I, in the 5th century, in St. Gregory the Great, end of the sixth century, beginning of the seventh century.

And their teaching was further developed by the medieval popes, especially in their many controversies with rulers.

Most famously, Pope St. Gregory the 7th in the investiture controversy with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV.

In developing these teachings, all of these popes appealed to premises taken from St. Augustine.

Therefore, the French historian, Monsignor Henri Xavier

called this teaching political Augustinianism

in a very influential little book that he published in 1933.

He argued in that book that the development of Augustinian premises by medieval popes and theologians

resulted in a doctrine that amounts to an absorption of the natural law institution of the state

by the ecclesiastical law of the church.

...