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.
Themes
God’s Sovereign Plan in History
City of God is a comprehensive history of the human race, focusing with special interest on the dual narratives of Roman history and biblical history. One of the main themes that Augustine traces through these historical narratives is the overriding importance of God’s sovereignty: “[A]ll tend, in God’s plan, to that end which is included in the whole design for the government of the universe” (476). God is the one who created the world and guides its events, intent on bringing the divine purpose to bear: namely, to love and save a community of human beings who are being shaped by virtue and thus made ready to share an eternity of holy joy in God’s own presence.
To say that God’s plan is sovereign means that he guides all events infallibly toward his great purpose—there is no possibility that anything could stop that purpose. Augustine establishes his conception of divine sovereignty on an argument for God’s foreknowledge of all future events. In the Christian conception articulated by Augustine, God exists outside of time and so can know all the events within time as if seeing them in a single instant: “Things which happen under the condition of time are in the future, not yet in being, or in the present, already existing, or in the past, no longer in being. But God comprehends all these in a stable and eternal present” (452). This necessarily includes future events, which are as fully known by God as past events.
Augustine insists, however, that this view of God’s sovereignty does not lead to a fatalistic determinism in which one’s own choices are already preordained (a view that he accuses pagan astrology of promoting). In the Christian conception, future events are fixed in God’s foreknowledge, but this does not diminish human free will, because our free actions are also known by God. God’s foreknowledge not only includes events but the proximate causes of those events, and human free actions are among those proximate causes. Thus the future is both predetermined in God’s foreknowledge in one sense, but also open to human free will in another sense, since our actions are both free and legitimately our own. Because of God’s absolute foreknowledge, God’s sovereign plan in history is assured of success, as divine actions work alongside human actions in bringing about an outcome that God has already foreseen: “He has in his hands the causes of all that exists; and all those causes are within his knowledge and at his disposition” (291).
Augustine’s portrayal of human history also underscores a Christian answer to a common pagan critique. In the Greco-Roman world, the antiquity of one’s faith was prized as a demonstration of its traditional truth and power, and Christianity was often criticized for being a recently-invented religion, in contrast to the deep antiquity of Greco-Roman paganism. By tracing the story of the city of God to its roots in the family of Adam and Eve, however, and by emphasizing the long span of history covered by the Old Testament, Augustine can point to a historical pedigree for Christianity that goes back even further than the pagan myths of Homer and Virgil.
The Folly of Pagan Religion
Among the main themes of City of God is the folly of pagan religion, a topic that finds its most thorough treatment in Part 1 of the book. In City of God, Augustine plays both defense (arguing for the truth of his own position, Christianity) and offense, and his main offensive tactic is to point out the many fallacies and failings of Roman paganism. He does this in many different ways, but the main points of his argument run along the following lines: (1) the gods of Roman paganism are not virtuous; (2) if one acknowledges a supreme god of any sort, polytheism becomes inherently illogical; (3) the pagan predilection for deifying abstract concepts is random and insensible; and (4) the history of Rome offers no firm evidence of the gods’ existence.
First, Augustine notes that in many of the legends and theatrical plays, the gods are portrayed as being full of shallow human vices like lust and petty ambition. If those depictions are even close to being accurate, then such gods are simply not good, possessing no virtue, and so are unworthy of worship: “If the tales are true, how degraded are the gods! If false, how degraded the worship!” (238). Even if those depictions are false, the fact that the gods permit them to be performed and retold suggests serious moral failings on the part of the gods.
Second, Augustine argues that an exclusively monotheistic observance simply makes more sense, and this holds true even if there were countless lesser gods alongside a supreme god. Augustine notes that in Roman paganism, Jupiter is regarded as the supreme god of the pantheon, whose powers and attributes eclipse those of all other gods: “If it is true that the rest of the gods are to be reduced to him [...] belief in a multiplicity of gods would be left a mere delusion, since Jupiter in himself is all gods” (270). It would be simpler and more sensible, says Augustine, just to worship Jupiter and not bother with any of the others.
Third, Augustine recounts several episodes of Romans deifying abstract concepts like Concord and Felicity, and then worshiping them as gods. Concord was worshiped after a tumultuous and violent episode in early Roman history, and Augustine mockingly remarks that if one were to invent a god to mark that event, Discord would have been a more fitting choice. In the case of Felicity (a word that indicates contented happiness and well-being), Augustine argues that since felicity is the goal of all human religion, one would not need any other gods at all if there really was one specifically devoted to delivering that result. Again, he argues, monotheistic worship would be more sensible, particularly if there were a God who was both supreme and who offered true felicity.
Fourth, Augustine notes that the pattern of Roman history does not show any evidence that the pagan gods are real. Using specific examples of devastating collapses and catastrophic losses from Roman history, he points out that the worship of the Roman gods did not forestall such tragedies: “How can our opponents have the effrontery […] to refuse to blame their gods for those catastrophes, while they hold Christ responsible for the disasters of modern times?” (131). Further, he argues that all of Rome’s successes could just as easily be attributed to the sovereign providence of the true God rather than to Rome’s pagan divinities. In contrast to the lack of evidence for pagan gods, Augustine asserts that Christianity can boast the evidence of historical prophecies that had clearly been fulfilled.
The Causes of Evil and Suffering
One of the questions that Augustine has to answer in City of God is why an all-powerful, benevolent God would permit evil and suffering in the world. The events surrounding the sack of Rome in the year 410 showed that not even God’s own followers were always spared the horror of violence and dispossession. The question concerns at least two main philosophical quandaries: first, whether God’s sovereignty implies that God is the author of evil; and second, why God does not simply prevent all evil from happening.
Even while defending a strong view of God’s sovereignty, Augustine does not accept the premise that God is the author of evil. Not only does that premise not accord with scripture or Christian tradition, but Augustine also finds it logically incoherent. Evil is never the direct result of God’s own actions, but rather proceeds from the free actions of God’s creatures. Though God presumably could have chosen to create only creatures who were incapable of choosing evil, such creatures would no longer be truly free.
Further, Augustine relies on Neoplatonic ideas to argue that evil does not actually have an identity and existence of its own, but is rather defined as the absence of the good: “Therefore good may exist on its own, but evil cannot” (474). Essentially, Augustine argues that evil does not exist at all, in and of itself—it is literally a “nothingness”—being a feature of circumstances in which goodness (which does exist, as it is rooted in the character of God) is no longer present: “There is no such entity in nature as ‘evil’; ‘evil’ is merely a name for the privation of the good” (454). Augustine ties the origins of evil to the free will of God’s creatures, since all creatures, according to Christian tradition, were created ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) rather than from preexistent material. Since human beings and all other creatures were created from nothing, our natures are capable of choosing the “nothingness” of evil in a way that God, who eternally exists as goodness, cannot. Thus, metaphysically speaking, God cannot possibly be the author of evil.
Augustine argues that God does not simply prevent all evil from happening because his sovereign providence is of such a high order that he can make good come out of evil. One of the ways this happens is through enabling people to grow in virtue. By persevering through sufferings and trials, human beings gain character traits like patience, which would be impossible to otherwise obtain. As Augustine explains, “There is a further reason for the infliction of temporal suffering on the good […]—that the spirit of man may be tested, that he may learn for himself what is the degree of disinterested devotion that he offers to God” (17). Also, since evil is partly a result of free human actions, any divine action that resisted all evil would represent a diminishment of human free will. Finally, Augustine also suggests that God permits evil to exist because its contrast with the good brings out the glory of goodness in greater clarity. The presence of evil’s contrasting influence allows human minds to see and recognize truth, beauty, and goodness for what they really are.
