ABSTRACT
The multitude of semi-Christian converts ushered into the Church by the social pressures on pagans constituted a serious pastoral problem, one to which Saint Augustine had been particularly sensitive in the early years of his priestly and episcopal ministry. Hence that 'political Augustinianism' so characteristic of the middle ages which, though scarcely in line with the grain of Augustine's own thought, has been aptly defined as 'a tendency to absorb natural law in supernatural justice, the right of the state in that of the Church'. With growing confidence in his Church's power to assimilate the masses, Augustine's chief inhibition about the policy of coercion lost its force. Augustine's 'theory' of coercion was, from beginning to end, part of a pastoral strategy. The importance of pastoral considerations in sanctioning the use of force is evident from Augustine's Letter 93. The notion of disciplina, with its cognates—correctio, per molestias eruditio—remained the kernel of his 'theory' of coercion.
