The City of God

The City of God against the Pagans (De Civitate Dei contra Paganos) is Augustine’s longest and most ambitious work — twenty-two books written over more than a decade (413–426/427) in answer to the pagan charge that Rome had fallen to the Goths in 410 because she had abandoned her ancestral gods for Christ. Out of that occasional polemic Augustine built a theology of history: the story of two “cities,” intermingled in this age, formed by two loves — the City of God by the love of God, the earthly city by the love of self — running from the fall of the angels to the Last Judgment. This file treats the work, its occasion, its argument, and its place in Christian thought.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

The Occasion: The Sack of Rome

On 24 August 410 the Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome and sacked the city for three days. The Eternal City — which had not fallen to a foreign enemy in eight hundred years — was plundered, and the shock ran through the whole Roman world (Brown 2000, ch. 25). The catastrophe gave new force to an old pagan accusation: that the disasters of the Empire were the gods’ revenge for Rome’s abandonment of their worship. If Rome had fallen, the pagans said, it was because the Christians had emptied her temples; the old gods, neglected, had withdrawn their protection (City of God 1.1; 2.3; Chadwick 1986, ch. 7). Refugees from the sack, some of them pagan aristocrats, were arriving in Africa with this charge on their lips. Augustine took it up.

He began the City of God in 413 and finished it about 426/427, releasing it in installments over those years; it was, he says in the Retractationes, a “great and arduous work” (magnum opus et arduum) (Retractationes 2.43; City of God, preface). The twenty-two books fall into two great movements. Books 1–10 are the polemical refutation of paganism: Books 1–5 argue that the gods never gave Rome earthly prosperity (and that prosperity is not the point in any case), and Books 6–10 that they cannot give the eternal life they were supposed to secure, demolishing in passing the claims of Roman civil religion and Neoplatonic theurgy. Books 11–22 are the constructive theology of the two cities, traced through their origin (11–14), their history (15–18), and their destined ends (19–22) (Chadwick 1986, ch. 7; Bettenson 1972, introduction).

“Two Loves Built Two Cities”

The architectural idea of the work is the doctrine of the two cities (civitates) — not two institutions, not the Church and the State, but two communities of love and allegiance running invisibly through all of human history and intermingled until the end. Augustine states the principle in a sentence that became one of the most quoted in Christian literature:

“Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.” (City of God 14.28; trans. NPNF I/2)

The City of God (civitas Dei) is the company of all the angels and human beings, of every age and nation, who love God and are bound for the eternal Sabbath of His presence; the earthly city (civitas terrena) is the company of those who love themselves and the goods of this world above God, bound for separation from Him. The two cities have their origin in the fall of the rebel angels and the fall of man, are prefigured in Cain (who built a city) and Abel (a pilgrim and stranger), and run, mingled together like wheat and tares, through the whole of sacred and secular history until they are finally separated at the Last Judgment (City of God 15.1; 18.54; Brown 2000, ch. 27).

It is essential to Augustine’s meaning — and often misread — that the two cities are not simply the Church and the world, or the Church and the Empire. The visible Church in this age contains members of both cities; the earthly city contains, hidden, future citizens of the heavenly. The two are inextricably mingled (permixtae) in time and known certainly only to God (City of God 1.35; 11.1). Augustine is no theocrat dreaming of a Christianized empire; his point is rather that no earthly polity, Rome included, is the City of God, and that the Christian lives in the earthly city as a pilgrim (peregrinus), using its peace but not resting in it (City of God 19.17). This pilgrim ecclesiology — the Church as resident alien in a passing world — is among the elements of the City of God most congenial to the Eastern tradition, and is not part of the contested Augustine.

Rome, Justice, and the Critique of Empire

The City of God is, among other things, a sustained deflation of Roman political pretension. Augustine grants the Romans their virtues — their love of glory, their discipline, their public spirit — but insists that these were natural virtues rewarded with natural goods (the earthly empire itself), not the saving virtues that earn eternal life (City of God 5.12–15). He famously asks what kingdoms are, without justice, but “great robberies” (magna latrocinia), and tells the tale of the pirate who answered Alexander the Great that he and the emperor differed only in scale — the pirate with one ship is called a robber, the emperor with a fleet an emperor (City of God 4.4; trans. NPNF I/2). True justice, Augustine argues against Cicero’s definition of a commonwealth, requires the rendering to God of what is His due, and so was never present in pagan Rome; a redefinition of “a people” as a multitude united by common loves lets him grant Rome a lesser, qualified existence as a res publica (City of God 19.21, 19.24).

This refusal to identify any empire — even a Christian one — with the Kingdom of God distinguishes Augustine sharply from the Eusebian political theology of the Christian Roman Empire as the earthly image of the heavenly monarchy, an identification far more at home in the Byzantine East. The contrast is a real one between Augustine’s pilgrim-city and the Byzantine symphonia of Church and Christian Empire, and is sometimes noted in discussions of Augustine’s distinctness from Eastern political thought (Brown 2000, ch. 27; see Augustine East and West).

The Last Things

The final books turn to eschatology. Book 19 takes up the question of the supreme good and locates it not in any earthly peace but in the peace of the heavenly city, “the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God” (City of God 19.13, 19.17; trans. NPNF I/2). Books 20–22 treat the Last Judgment, the resurrection of the body, the pains of the lost, and the eternal blessedness of the saved. Here Augustine’s harder positions appear — his belief that the massa damnata of fallen humanity is justly condemned and that only a portion is saved by grace, the eschatological face of his doctrine of predestination (City of God 21–22; see Predestination and the Eastern Objection). But the work ends not in fear but in vision: the eternal Sabbath in which the saints will rest and see and love and praise, “the end without end” (finis sine fine), where “we shall rest and we shall see, we shall see and we shall love, we shall love and we shall praise” (City of God 22.30; trans. NPNF I/2). The “restless heart” of the Confessions finds, at the close of the City of God, its final rest.

Legacy

The City of God gave the Latin West a theology of history and a way of thinking about the relation of the Church to the temporal order that would shape medieval political thought for a thousand years — though often in ways Augustine would not have recognized, as later readers pressed his two cities into a program for the supremacy of Church over State that his own pilgrim ecclesiology does not support (Brown 2000, ch. 27). For the Christian East the City of God was little read in its own right — Augustine’s Greek was poor and his works were slow to be translated (see Augustine East and West) — but its central intuitions, the relativizing of every earthly city before the City of God and the Christian as pilgrim, belong to the common patristic mind and are not among the points of Eastern reservation. The contested Augustine lies elsewhere — in the doctrine of grace and the Trinity — to which the following sections turn.

See Also

References

  • Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2. 1887; and trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. G. R. Evans. London: Penguin, 1972/2003. (“Two loves” at 14.28; “great robberies” at 4.4; the pilgrim at 19.17; the supreme good at 19.13; the eternal Sabbath at 22.30.)
  • Augustine of Hippo. Retractationes 2.43 (on the City of God).
  • Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Chs. 25, 27.)
  • Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Ch. 7.)