Abstract

In this article, I offer a reading of City of God 19.6 that is consonant with Augustine’s message to real judges. Often read as a suggestion that torture and execution are judicially necessary, I argue that 19.6 actually calls such necessities into question, though this is not its primary purpose; first and foremost, 19.6 is an indictment of Stoicapatheia. Situating 19.6 within Augustine’s larger polemic against the Stoics, I find that it presents the Stoic judge as a man who lacks fellow feeling, and therefore, has only a parodic happiness, costly to himself and those judges. A new look at Augustine’s letters to judges confirms this reading, and shows that, for Augustine, the man ofhumanitasis the true model for the good judge, not the man ofapatheia.