In this book, I have tried to answer the question ‘How did Augustine conceive the just society?’, a question which I first addressed in my 1992 doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford, ‘Language and Justice in Augustine's City of God’. The question refers not to the communion of saints in the heavenly city, which is the ideal ‘just society’, but to the city of God in its earthly pilgrimage. I noted that there were sufficient scholarly studies available which treated various aspects of Augustine's social and political thought, as well as a good number of studies concerned with particular aspects of his City of God. Robert Markus's Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge, 1970, 1989) in many respects represents the best of both sets of studies. However, I thought that there was room and, indeed, need for a study which attempted to bring together various areas of Augustine's thought which are too often studied in isolation from each other. This is a defect that I find generally present in Augustinian studies, and in my view it hinders deeper understanding of his thought. It is clear to me, for example, that studies concerned with Augustine's political thought invariably pay little attention to his thinking about Christ and scriptural interpretation, and make almost no effort to ask what role these and other areas in his thought contribute to his political ethics.