The City of God

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.

The constructive half of the work, books eleven to twenty two, narrates all of history as the story of two cities. They are founded, Augustine says, by two loves: the earthly city by love of self reaching contempt of God, the heavenly by love of God reaching contempt of self. The cities are not church and state, and the distinction is the book's subtlest point. Membership is decided by the orientation of the heart, so the institutional church contains citizens of the earthly city and the earthly city's institutions contain pilgrims of the heavenly one; the two populations are inseparably mingled until the last judgment sorts them.

Augustine traces both lines from the angels' fall and Cain and Abel through Israel and the nations to the age of the church, which he refuses to read as history's triumphant final act, coining instead the sober image of the saeculum, the overlapping time in which both cities share the same earthly peace, use the same goods, and suffer the same losses. The closing books turn to the ends: judgment, punishment and the eternal sabbath of the saints, with the resurrection of the body defended at length against Platonist disdain. Peace is the thread that binds the argument, defined as the tranquillity of order, and the earthly city's peace, real but provisional, is honoured exactly as far as it goes.