In the City of God, the world view of Augustine is shaped by the Biblical sin of Adam and the Fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.
Augustine asserted that, had these not been a reality, there would been no need for social inequality, or for rulers to oversee the ruled.
Social hierarchy became necessary in an imperfect world in order to place some control on the evil actions of people.
The ruler was not to be seen as privileged, but as carrying a heavy responsibility to encourage virtue and to punish vice, and to give aid and counsel in the name and spirit of love.
Being the master over slaves (and, by extension, the rule of presidents and monarchs over their subjects) is a responsibility of the ruler for the ruled, and it is limited to this world of sin.
In heaven, the rulers will be freed from their responsibilities, and slaves will be freed from their servitude.
Masters and slaves, kings and subjects, will be equal in the next world. Therefore they should behave in this world with awareness of their fundamental, spiritual equality.
Here was a Christian manifesto on "the right of kings" that was the opposite to what many a civic ruler wished to hear. It was the right of being responsible and of being a servant, and not the right of privilege and domination.
In his
Confessions he reflected on the time when nevertheless he had ended up in the politics.
Recalling his service at the imperial court in Milan as the official professor of rhetoric or "spin doctor" for the Emperor, he wrote , "How unhappy I was, O Lord, and how conscious You made me of my misery on that day when I was preparing to deliver a panegyric on the emperor! In the course of it I would tell numerous lies and by my lies would win the good opinion of people who knew [them] to be untrue."
From about the year 410 (by which time he had been a Christian leader in Hippo for fifteen years) until the end of his life, Augustine remained completely disillusioned with politics.
He was never convinced that he was living in Christian times. Only once in all his voluminous writings did he mention that the Christian church might sanctify the empire.
Such a political goal was not a focus in his line of thinking or teaching.
