Written in the Ruins of an Idea

In August 410 Alaric's Goths entered Rome and plundered it for three days. The material damage was recoverable; the shock was not, for Rome had not fallen to an enemy in eight hundred years, and refugees carried the question across the Mediterranean to Africa: had the abandonment of the old gods destroyed the city that worshipped them.

Augustine, bishop of Hippo, began his answer in 413 and finished it thirteen years later. The first ten books are demolition. Five argue that the pagan gods never protected Rome in this life, marshalling the disasters of Roman history from Roman historians themselves, and pressing the scandal that the sack's survivors had sheltered in Christian basilicas the Goths spared. Five more argue against the philosophers that the gods cannot give happiness in the life to come either, engaging the Platonists with a respect he never extends to civic religion. Underneath the polemic runs a deeper move: Augustine detaches the fortunes of the Christian faith from the fortunes of the Roman state. Rome was not eternal, and its fall is not God's defeat. Empires rise and pass within providence, but no empire, however Christian its rulers, is the City of God, a severing of church from imperial destiny that would echo through every later argument about religion and political power.