The City of God

Overview

In August 410 a Gothic army entered Rome and spent three days plundering it. The city had not fallen to a foreign enemy in eight hundred years, and refugees carried the news across the Mediterranean to North Africa, where Augustine was bishop of Hippo. Educated pagans had an explanation ready: Rome had abandoned the gods who made it great, and this was the bill. Augustine began answering in 413 and finished thirteen years later, by which point the answer had grown into twenty-two books and stopped being a reply to anybody.

It is a huge, uneven, digressive work, and it is essential to know its shape before starting. The first half, books 1 to 10, is polemical and mostly negative. Books 1 to 5 argue against those who worship the old gods for worldly advantage; books 6 to 10 against those who worship them for eternal life, including the Platonists and the philosopher Porphyry, whom Augustine treats with more respect than anyone else he disagrees with. The second half, books 11 to 22, is constructive and comes in three groups of four: the origins of the two cities in books 11 to 14, their courses through history in 15 to 18, and their ends in 19 to 22.

Nobody reads all of it on a first pass and nobody should. Whole books are occupied with Varro’s catalogue of Roman deities. But the good parts include some of the most consequential pages in Western thought, and they are findable.

The argument

The negative half clears ground. Augustine points out that the sack was mild by ancient standards, that the basilicas were respected and many lives spared, and that in any case Rome’s gods had presided over Cannae, the Gallic sack of 390 BCE and a century of civil war without intervening. He reads Roman history through Roman authors, Sallust and Cicero and Varro, and finds a record of fratricide, rape and conquest starting with Romulus. The pagan cults, he argues, never taught morals; the theatre they sponsored taught the opposite. Against the philosophers he makes a narrower case: the Platonists understood that God is immaterial and that the soul’s happiness lies in him, and then made the fatal concession to demon-worship and could not accept that the divine took flesh.

He also, along the way, deals with the sack’s real victims. Book 1 addresses Christian women who were raped and who feared they had lost their chastity or should have killed themselves as Lucretia did. Augustine argues that purity is in the will, that the violated are guiltless, and that suicide is not permitted. It is one of the earliest sustained arguments in Western literature that a rape victim is innocent, and it is also, to modern readers, cold.

The constructive half begins with creation and the angels. Some angels turned from God to themselves, and that turning is the model of all evil: not a substance, since everything that is, is good insofar as it is, but a privation, a defect in a good nature. An evil will, he says, has no efficient cause but a deficient one. From Adam’s fall a whole race inherits a disordered will that loves lesser goods more than greater ones. Cain and Abel found the two cities in history, and thereafter every society and every soul is mixed.

Book 19 is where the political theory lives, and it is the part most often assigned alone. Augustine reviews the schools on the supreme good and concludes that no earthly life can be happy, because none can be secure. Cicero had defined a commonwealth as a people united by agreement on right and shared interest; Augustine takes that seriously enough to conclude Rome was never one, since true justice requires giving God his due. Rather than leave the concept empty he substitutes another: a people is a multitude united by the objects of its love. He then distinguishes the peace of Babylon, real and worth using, from the peace of the heavenly city, and says Christians should use the first while belonging to the second. Here too are his pages on the judge who must torture witnesses and on when war may be waged, which later writers built into just war theory.

Books 20 to 22 handle the last things: judgement, punishment, and a final book on the resurrection body and the eternal Sabbath, where the word he ends on is peace.

How to read it

Read selectively and in this order. Book 1, chapters 1 to 14 and 35, for the occasion and the hard consolation. Book 2, chapters 18 to 21, for the attack on Roman virtue. Book 5, chapters 12 to 21, for his account of why Rome was given an empire. Book 11, chapters 1 to 6, and Book 12, chapters 6 to 9, for creation, time and the cause of an evil will. Book 14, chapters 13 and 28, for pride and the two loves. Then all of Book 19, slowly. Then Book 22, chapter 30, for the ending.

When you read the polemic, remember that his targets are not ours. He is arguing with living, literate opponents about a religion that still had temples. The tedium of book 6 is the tedium of a man refuting a bestseller nobody reads any more.

Watch for the two cities being mystical rather than institutional. Augustine does not mean church and state. Both cities are mixed in both institutions, and no visible community is identical with either, a point that later readers who wanted to build the city of God on earth consistently ignored.

Bettenson’s Penguin is the practical complete version. The Dyson translation in the Cambridge texts series is better for close political reading and prints the chapter headings clearly. Marcus Dods’ nineteenth-century version is free online if you want to search the Latin sense.

Questions it raises

• If no regime can be just, on what basis should a Christian prefer one government to another?
• Is defining a people by what it loves an improvement on defining it by agreed right, or an abandonment of the standard?
• Augustine says evil is a privation with no efficient cause. Does that explain the first bad choice, or restate it?
• He detaches Christian hope from Rome’s fate. Does that free the church or license political indifference?
• The two cities are invisible and intermixed. What work is the distinction actually doing?
• His consolation to the women of Book 1 rests on locating virtue in the will alone. What does that account leave out?