57 pages • 1 hour read
Saint AugustineThe City of God
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 426A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures & InstitutionsKey Figures
Augustine of Hippo (The Author)
Aurelius Augustinus, known to later tradition simply as Augustine, is regarded as a saint in many Christian communions and as a Doctor of the Church in Roman Catholicism. As a leading writer of the early church, he is also referred to as a “church father,” together with many of the other major writers from the early centuries of Christianity. He is one of the foremost figures in the development of Western philosophy and of the theology of both major Western Christian traditions, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. He wrote dozens of influential books, two of which have become classics not only of Christian theology, but of Western literature more broadly: his Confessions (a spiritual autobiography), and City of God.
Augustine was born in Thagaste, north Africa (modern-day Algeria) in 354 CE, into a mixed religious family with a pagan father and a Christian mother (Monica, also regarded as a saint). He studied in Carthage and pursued Manichaeism, a syncretistic religious movement in late antiquity, during his young adulthood, before converting to Christianity while in Milan, Italy in the 380s. After his conversion, he returned to north Africa and undertook the ministries of writing and organizing a monastic group. He also served as a priest in the city of Hippo Regius, from which his common title, Augustine of Hippo, derives, and of which he would later become the bishop. He died in Hippo Regius in 430 CE, shortly before the city’s fall to the invading Vandal armies.
Augustine was shaped by the Christian philosophical tradition as it had developed by the fourth century, rooted in a worldview based on the biblical canon of scriptures. He was also influenced by Neoplatonism, a Greco-Roman philosophical school rooted in the writings of Plato (fourth-third centuries BCE) and later developed by thinkers like Plotinus and Porphyry (third century CE). Certain key concepts in Augustine’s philosophy appear to be drawn from Neoplatonism, but all such concepts are defensible from the Christian worldview, and he adopted nothing that stood in contradiction to the Bible. His synthesis of biblical theology and classical philosophy laid the groundwork for nearly all subsequent developments in Western theology and philosophy over the span of more than a millennium after his death. The legacy of Augustine remains a defining feature of much contemporary Christian thought, particularly in Roman Catholic and Protestant circles.
The Roman Empire
The Roman Empire is an institution that looms large in City of God, as the main temporal manifestation of the “earthly city,” which Augustine sets against the “city of God.” Augustine treats the whole empire as an extension of Rome’s identity as a civitate (“city”), a single society grounded in a particular culture of citizenship. By Augustine’s time, Rome’s political life had already spanned nearly 1200 years of history, growing from a city-state to a republic to an empire. Augustine interacts with the whole sweep of Rome’s history in his book, focusing particular attention on the early foundations of the city and its polytheistic religion, as well as on its aggressive territorial growth during the late republic and early empire.
More recent Roman history receives a lighter touch from Augustine, perhaps because his literary usage of Rome as a symbol of paganism necessitates a focus on earlier centuries. While Rome was pagan throughout its growth as a republic (into the first century BCE) and its life as an empire from Augustus Caesar to Constantine (roughly the first three centuries CE), the period of Roman history in which Augustine lived was markedly different. From Constantine on, the Roman state had ceased to be officially pagan in its religious orientation, and it had moved from being tolerant of Christianity to outwardly espousing Christianity as the official religion of the empire. In order to use Rome to make his contrast between the earthly city and the city of God, it better fits Augustine’s argument to focus on the pagan Roman state that had persisted before the turn of the fourth century CE, and so the Christian emperors of Augustine’s own time receive only a little attention.
The main contemporary event that draws Augustine’s attention is the sack of Rome by the Visigoth leader Alaric in 410 CE, an event that had a seismic impact on the sensibilities of the age. Though it was an episode that passed quickly, it was the first time since becoming the seat of an empire that Rome itself had been breached by enemy forces. As such, it shattered the popular belief that the order and stability of the Roman Empire was unshakable. In response, a backlash against Christianity occurred, and some prominent voices began calling for a return to paganism, under which Rome was perceived to have been stronger. This resurgent nostalgia for Rome’s pagan roots forms the backdrop against which Augustine frames his arguments in City of God.
The Catholic Church
Alongside the Roman Empire, the other institution that holds a central place in City of God is the catholic church. In Augustine’s time, this institution is not yet designated as the “Roman Catholic Church,” but simply as the catholic church, since the schisms that would separate the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Roman Catholic Church still lay in the future. “Catholic” is a word meaning “universal,” and so the term “catholic church” refers to the totality of Christian congregations and believers in Augustine’s day.
This totality, represented in the institutional life of church parishes scattered across the ancient world, is taken by Augustine to be the main temporal manifestation of the city of God during his time. This symbolic usage is parallel to Augustine’s use of Rome as a manifestation of the earthly city. He nowhere argues that Rome was the entirety of that earthly city, but rather that Rome was the most prominent example of it in his own day. Similarly, he traces the city of God through many different ages of history in which it is manifested in the lives of biblical characters and in ancient Israel, but in his own day, the catholic church is taken to be the primary current example of it.
In another sense, however, the parallel with Rome falls short. Augustine views the earthly city to be rooted in this world and its present realities, just as Rome itself is. The city of God, however, is rooted in a reality that lies beyond this world and anticipates a fulfillment in the heavenly age to come. As such, the life of the catholic church in his own day can never represent a full picture of the life of the “city of God,” as that city lies beyond the scope of this world and its finite historical timelines. The catholic church is thus the current collection of that city’s citizens, who are on a pilgrimage through this temporal world until they reach their goal in the city of God. Rome and the catholic church, then, are not parallel institutions, but represent two very different realities.
Marcus Terentius Varro
Throughout City of God, Augustine interacts with the writings of a large number of pagan thinkers and philosophers, including Virgil, Cicero, Plato, Porphyry, and Apuleius. He devotes the most time and attention, however, to interacting with the writings of Marcus Terentius Varro, a Roman scholar from the first century BCE. Varro was held in lofty regard in Roman culture as a representative of the golden age of Latin literature, along with Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Ovid, and Horace. He became influential for his reconstruction of a year-by-year history of the Roman state, which despite a few errors, became the accepted chronology for hundreds of years.
Varro’s voluminous works touch on nearly every subject of interest to the ancient Roman mind, but Augustine interacts with him in three distinct fields: his treatment of Roman history, his philosophy, and his theology of Roman paganism. Since all three of these fields are relevant to Augustine’s arguments in City of God, Varro becomes one of his main conversation partners in the text. Augustine often disagrees with Varro’s philosophical and theological positions, but holds his scholarship in high regard, which makes him a useful rhetorical foil for the purposes of pressing Augustine’s arguments forward.
