Augustine on State, Property, War, and Slavery: A Christian Perspective

When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 CE, pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods. St. Augustine of Hippo answered that crisis with one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written, The City of God. In it, he reframed how the West thinks about government, ownership, conflict, and human bondage. For Augustine, none of these institutions were natural or good in themselves. They were products of a broken world, tools that a sinful humanity needed to survive its own corruption. His ideas marked a sharp break from the classical tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and they shaped medieval thought for the next thousand years.

The fall and the two cities
The state as a remedy for sin
Why this mattered for the West
Private property: convention, not nature
The just war: punishing sin and restoring peace
From pacifism to justified force
The conditions for a just war
Slavery: contrary to nature, permitted by judgment
A unified vision of fallen institutions

The fall and the two cities

To understand Augustine’s politics, you first need his theology of sin. Augustine taught that humans are inherently flawed because of the Fall, the original sin committed by Adam and Eve in Eden. This sinfulness corrupts human behaviour, producing conflict, greed, and injustice in all earthly affairs. Before the Fall, humanity lived in harmony and needed no coercive authority. After it, conflict became unavoidable.

This led Augustine to his famous distinction between two “cities.” The City of God is made up of people who orient their lives toward eternal truths and the love of God, while the Earthly City is driven by self-love, power, and material desire. These are not literally Heaven and a particular kingdom. They are two ways of living that run through all of history and even through individual hearts. All actual states belong to the Earthly City, which is why Augustine refused to treat any government as the highest human good.

The state as a remedy for sin

Here Augustine departs dramatically from classical thinkers. For Aristotle, the state was the “perfect community,” the natural fulfilment of human social life and the precondition for living a virtuous life. Cicero too defined the republic as an assembly bound by shared justice and common interest. To the classical mind, personal flourishing and political flourishing were inseparable.

Augustine rejected this entirely. He argued that political rule was quite literally a necessary evil, something that came into being only because of humanity’s fallen state. God never intended one human to dominate another; He gave humans dominion over animals, not over each other. Sin alone created the need for political coercion.

So why have a state at all? Because without one, sinful people would tear society apart. Despite his pessimistic view of human nature, Augustine held that government, though a necessary evil, performs an essential function. Its job is to restrain the wicked, punish wrongdoing, and maintain a basic peace that allows people to live together. This is a far humbler vision than Aristotle’s. The state cannot make people good or deliver true justice. It can only keep disorder in check.

Why this mattered for the West

By locating the purpose of government in restraining sin rather than achieving the good life, Augustine launched what one scholar calls a sustained assault on the classical tradition. He argued that political authority exists to restrain and humble those subject to it, and that citizens do not become virtuous simply by participating in political life. This idea, that the state is a corrective for human wickedness rather than the arena of human excellence, profoundly shaped medieval and even modern thinking about limited government.

Private property: convention, not nature

Augustine applied the same logic to ownership. He did not believe private property was a natural right rooted in the way God first made the world. In his view, only common property would have been consistent with natural law had the Fall never happened; private ownership emerged as a remedy and a punishment for sin. Greed entered the world through human corruption, and property boundaries, defended by the state, became a way to contain that greed and keep avarice from destroying society.

One of Augustine’s sharpest claims was that property rights come from human law, not divine law. In his commentary on the Gospel of John, he asked by what right a person possesses what they possess, and answered that it is by human right, that is, by the laws of emperors and kings. By divine right, the earth belongs to God and is shared equally by rich and poor alike. The implication is striking: if ownership is created by human law, then human authority can also revise it. Property rights, in this view, are not absolute and must yield to the public welfare.

This tension between individual ownership and collective need still echoes today. Modern land acquisition laws, for instance, recognise private property while granting the state the authority to acquire land for public purposes with fair compensation. That balance reflects exactly the kind of qualified, non-absolute property right Augustine described.

The just war: punishing sin and restoring peace

Augustine is widely credited as the founder of just war theory, the idea that armed force can be morally justified under certain conditions. He developed these ideas partly to answer a problem within Christianity itself.

From pacifism to justified force

The early Church, living under a pagan Roman empire, had largely preached pacifism, taking seriously Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies. As Christianity moved from a persecuted faith to the religion of the empire, Augustine’s contributions established a punitive concept of jus ad bellum, the right to wage war, as a deliberate refutation of Christian pacifism. He argued that a Christian could, in good conscience, take up arms when the cause was just.

The conditions for a just war

Augustine set out the seeds of criteria that later thinkers would refine. For him, a just war had two primary goals, to punish wrongdoing and to restore peace. Crucially, war had to be declared by a legitimate authority, an emperor or king, rather than by angry individuals or mobs. The legal authority bore the moral responsibility for the decision, not the individual soldier carrying it out.

Augustine did not invent these ideas from nothing. Scholars note that he built upon classical sources rather than creating just war thought from scratch, drawing especially on Cicero and older Roman conventions about properly declared war. What he did was give these ideas a Christian theological foundation. His framework would later be systematised by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, who laid out clear conditions of proper authority, just cause, and right intention.

This tradition is not a historical curiosity. Just war theory now forms part of the basis of modern international humanitarian law, shaping the rules that govern when states may use force and how they must conduct themselves in conflict.

Slavery: contrary to nature, permitted by judgment

Augustine’s treatment of slavery follows the same pattern as his views on the state and property, and it again breaks with classical thought. He insisted that by nature, in the condition in which God first created humanity, no person is the slave of another or of sin. God intended humans to rule over animals, not over fellow humans. In principle, then, slavery contradicts the original divine design.

This set Augustine apart from Aristotle, who had argued that some people are slaves by nature and that slavery benefits both master and slave. Augustine denied this natural justification outright. Yet, and this is where modern readers find him troubling, he did not call for abolition. Instead, he taught that the prime cause of slavery is sin, and that the condition of bondage exists as a result of divine judgment in a fallen world.

For Augustine, slavery functioned as both punishment and a means of preserving order. He contemplated the institution’s origin in The City of God and concluded it was caused by human sin but permitted by God as a form of judgment, fitting it within a hierarchical society. He urged masters to act without pride or cruelty and slaves to serve faithfully, framing the relationship as one in which humility could be spiritually beneficial. He even suggested it is a happier condition to be the slave of a man than the slave of one’s own lust.

It is important to read this honestly. Augustine’s stance on slavery was unexceptional for his era and falls far short of modern moral standards. His real innovation was theological rather than reformist: he denied that slavery was natural while still accepting it as a tolerable feature of a sinful world. The deeper point he wanted to make was that everyone is ultimately a “slave” of God, and that the worst bondage is enslavement to sin.

A unified vision of fallen institutions

What ties all four themes together is a single, powerful idea. The state, private property, war, and slavery are all institutions that Augustine considered absent from God’s original design for humanity. Each became necessary only because sin corrupted human nature and made conflict, greed, and domination unavoidable. They are, in his framework, remedies and punishments at the same time, holding a broken world together while reminding us of how far it has fallen.

This was a genuinely new way of thinking about politics. Where the Greeks saw the state as the summit of human achievement, Augustine saw it as scaffolding propping up a damaged structure. By weaving Christian theology into political philosophy, he built the bridge between the classical world and medieval Europe and gave later thinkers a vocabulary, original sin, divine providence, the just war, that would dominate Western thought for centuries.

What do you think? If institutions like the state and property exist mainly to manage human flaws rather than to perfect human life, should we judge a government by how well it restrains the worst in us, or by how much it helps us flourish? And does Augustine’s idea that human law, not nature, defines ownership change how you view debates over property and the public good today?

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Table of Contents

The fall and the two cities 🔗

The state as a remedy for sin 🔗

Why this mattered for the West 🔗

Private property: convention, not nature 🔗

The just war: punishing sin and restoring peace 🔗

From pacifism to justified force 🔗

The conditions for a just war 🔗

Slavery: contrary to nature, permitted by judgment 🔗

A unified vision of fallen institutions 🔗