№ 4 - 2006
Editorial Introduction.
Blessed Augustine and Civitas Terrena

In this issue we acquaint the readers with the Russian translation of one of the letters of Aurelius Augustine of Hippo. The time of Blessed Augustine's life (354 — 430) fell on a period of cardinal change of the political and spiritual make-up of the world. Not only the system of moral values and of reference standards of the ancient world, but also a considerable part of political experience it had accumulated, were becoming things of the past. Turning to Aurelius Augustine's epistolary heritage presents a unique chance to retrace the process of formation of the historiosophical and political conception which later found embodiment in his famous "duae civitatum "theory and for almost a thousand years became a dominant in the political thinking of West European Middle Ages.