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WorkAugustine of Hippo

The City of God

Rome fell in 410 and the pagans blamed the Christians; Augustine answered with twenty-two books and two cities that run through all of history.

by Augustine of Hippo2,580 passages held

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Original title
De civitate Dei contra paganos
First published
(aged 59)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

In 410 Alaric's Goths took Rome and sacked it for three days, and across the empire pagans drew the obvious lesson: the city had stood for a thousand years under its old gods and fell within a century of deserting them for Christ. Augustine spent the next thirteen or fourteen years answering that charge, from about 413 to 426, in twenty-two books — the longest sustained argument he ever wrote. The first half dismantles the accusation directly: Rome had been sacked and starved and torn by civil war long before any Christian emperor, and the gods it credited with its greatness had never protected it or made it good. Then the argument turns and builds its own structure, the one the title names. Two cities run through all of history, distinguished not by walls but by love — the earthly city bound together by love of self carried to contempt of God, the heavenly city by love of God carried to contempt of self — and no visible empire, Rome included, is ever simply the one or the other. Christians are told to expect no lasting home in any state and to use the peace of this world without mistaking it for the peace they are promised. The work outlived its occasion completely: the pagan complaint it was written to answer faded, and the two cities became one of the frames medieval Europe used to think about the church, the empire, and the ends of political power itself.

Key concepts

What are the two cities in the City of God?

Two communities defined not by territory but by love: the earthly city, bound by love of self carried to contempt of God, and the heavenly city, bound by love of God carried to contempt of self. They run mingled through all history, their members scattered among every people, and are sorted invisibly, to be separated only at the last judgment. No actual state is straightforwardly either one.

Why did Augustine write the City of God?

In 410 Alaric's Goths sacked Rome, and pagans charged that the city fell because it had abandoned its old gods for Christ. Augustine spent some thirteen years, from about 413 to 426, answering that accusation in twenty-two books. The first half refutes the charge directly; the second builds the theology of the two cities, so the work outgrew its occasion into a full account of history and political order.

What did Augustine think of the Roman Empire?

He denied it any sacred status. Rome's greatness, he granted, came from a genuine but lesser virtue, the love of glory, which God rewarded with earthly dominion, its full and only payment. But no empire is the city of God, and Christians owe no state their ultimate allegiance. A commonwealth without true justice, he suggests, is finally little better than a large band of robbers.

How does Augustine explain why the good suffer and the wicked prosper?

By deferral. Reward and punishment are settled at the end of history, not within it, so present fortune is no measure of desert. The same afflictions, he adds, work differently on different souls, purifying the good and hardening the wicked, as one fire hardens clay and melts wax. Providence governs throughout, but its justice is largely hidden, to be trusted rather than read off events.

What does Augustine mean by calling Christians resident aliens?

Because the heavenly city is not yet gathered, its members live as pilgrims or resident aliens in whatever earthly state they inhabit. They use its peace, obey its laws and share its goods, but do not mistake it for their true home or its peace for the peace they are finally promised. The image sets a lasting distance between the believer's citizenship and any political order.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Two cities, told apart by love

What finally divides people, if not nation, class or creed? Augustine answers with two cities woven through all history, marked out not by walls but by what each loves.

Two loves built two cities, Augustine writes: the earthly city by love of self carried to contempt of God, the heavenly by love of God carried to contempt of self. They are not two empires or two churches but two allegiances running mingled through every age, invisibly sorted, to be separated only at the end. No visible state, Rome included, is ever simply the one or the other, and the members of each are scattered among all peoples. Because the true city is not yet gathered, Christians live as resident aliens in whatever state they inhabit, using its peace without mistaking it for the peace they are finally promised.

  • community
  • identity
  • justice
  • transformation
  • faith
  • spirituality
  • transcendence

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A shape hidden in all of history

Does history move toward anything, or merely repeat and decay? Augustine reads the whole human story as a single providential arc, its meaning known to God and only glimpsed by us.

Against the pagan sense of time as endless cycles, Augustine gives history a beginning, a direction and an end, one drama running from creation to last judgment. Providence governs it, but its workings stay largely hidden: the good suffer and the wicked flourish because reward and punishment are deferred to an end we cannot see from inside. He rejects any confident reading of events as plain divine verdicts, Rome's fall included, and warns against mistaking present fortune for God's favour. History has a meaning, but it is God's to know and ours mostly to trust, not to decode into simple signs of favour or wrath.

  • history
  • providence
  • teleology
  • time
  • interpretation
  • judgment
  • divine providence

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Answering the charge against the Christians

Rome stood a thousand years under its old gods and fell within a century of turning to Christ. Augustine takes up the accusation and turns it back on the gods themselves.

In 410 Alaric's Goths sacked Rome, and pagans blamed the desertion of the old gods for Christ. Augustine answers directly: Rome had been sacked, starved and torn by civil war long before any Christian emperor, and the gods it credited never protected it or made its people good, being patrons of vice in the very tales told of them. What greatness Rome had came from a love of glory, a virtue of a kind but not the true one, and even that God rewarded with the empire it sought. The gods offered neither earthly safety nor eternal life, so their loss took nothing real away.

  • authority
  • power
  • virtue
  • morality
  • tradition
  • theology
  • human nature

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Within this work

passages held
2,580
distinct concepts
1,800
by passages held, corpus-wide
#5

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: justice with morality.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 8 pairings. 99 shared passages in all. 92 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
justicemorality19
historytruth16
interpretationtruth16
ethicsmorality13
ethicsjustice12
sufferingtransformation9
justicesuffering8
historyjustice6

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 387 The Soliloquies (Soliloquia)

    The most inward of Augustine's early philosophical dialogues, written at the Cassiciacum retreat before he took orders — the one that invented the form, and the word, for talking with oneself.

     LAEN
  2. 397 The Confessions of St. Augustine (Confessiones)

    Composed in Augustine's first years as a bishop, the Confessions looks back on the conversion his early Cassiciacum dialogues had just followed, and turns a private reckoning into a form no one had written before.

     LAEN
  3. 413 The City of God (De civitate Dei contra paganos) you are here LAEN
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