ABSTRACT
The history of Christianity is a history of contesting interpretations, power politics, and all the accompanying victories, defeats, intrigues, compromises, and loss of purity that characterizes the hell of the political realm combined with flashes of Christ-like lives and inspirations. Augustine is the most important political figure in the construction of the West. Augustine's great hope was that the body created out of divine love realized through the faith of Christ's disciples might become coextensive with human society as a whole: that it might absorb, transform, and perfect, the existing bonds of human relations. Augustine invokes the state to use its powers to punish heretics in order to save the unity of the church, like Luther and Calvin and other men living in violent times aspiring to create social peace, the violence of the times stuck to his thinking. The real issue for Augustine was what one loved most: the self as self, or God.
