OUR RESEARCH

Between Faith and Reason: Political and Legal Heritage of St. Augustine of Hippo

To a researcher of political and legal doctrines, it might only seem that the state of research on Augustinian doctrine is exhausted. The Bishop of Hippona was a versatile and prolific writer, and left behind a vast intellectual material, which became not so much the ground for a significant and influential current of “political Augustinianism” as it was constructing basic, essential concepts and cognitive figures in the field of political-legal doctrines. The creator of the term “political Augustinianism” is H. X. Arquillière (Arquillière used the term in his work “L'Augustinisme politique, essai sur la formation des théories politiques au Moyen Âge” Paris 1934), who tried to encapsulate in this term the relations that occurred between Augustinian thought and the political-cultural current of the Middle Ages. Arquillière's research, however, did not focus on the essence of the doctrine - it was more of a contextual-historical nature, and this is the type of research that studies of political thought related to Augustine often have. The second type of studies are those discussing doctrine, consisting of reconstructing Augustine's views on the state and law, e.g., H. A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine. Augustine; J. Von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World; Kornatowski W., Społeczno-polityczna myśl św. Augustyna. However, it is impossible to find a comprehensive study that, abstracting from the historical context, descriptively systematizes Augustine's views on the state and law, distilling from them essential concepts and cognitive figures, which are the ground for pointing out how great a civilizing role the novelty of this philosophy played and what influence it had on political-legal doctrines in general (the figure of authority, the construct of free will, the historiosophical revolution). It is also impossible to find a study of the doctrine through the prism of the numerous disputes occurring in the literature on the subject (the issues of anti-humanitarianism and autocratism; the concepts of iustitia, libertas). Based on the methodology and tradition of the Lodz school of political-legal doctrines, the doctoral dissertation under development will undertake to reliably fill a specific blind spot in research.

Researchers: Arman Gevorgyan