Thirteenth-century scholastics were addicted to quoting statements of Augustine's, as of other sancti, as auctoritates in support of their opinions. The conventions of the scholastic employment of auctoritates are now tolerably well known. A modern scholar will not be surprised by frequent divergences between the meaning of such statements in their original setting and the meaning given them by one or other thirteenth-century theologian. Thirteenth-century theologians would have been even less worried by such divergences. Their analysis can, nevertheless, be illuminating. In this Appendix I examine the use made by a number of thirteenth-century writers of Augustine's statements about the origins and nature of political authority and subjection, mainly in the De civitate Dei, Book xix, Chapters 14 and 15. This is one of the points at which we should expect the impact of Aristotelian ideas to show itself most clearly on political thought. It is here that we may best test the validity of the rival claims that the impact of these ideas revolutionised medieval political thought or, alternatively, that they stood in direct continuity with traditional, patristic and especially Augustinian thought-forms.

A. J. Carlyle may serve as representing the more widely held view: