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.
Background
Authorial Context: Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo is one of the key thinkers in the Christian tradition, with an influence unparalleled in Western Christian theology by anyone after the apostle Paul. His landmark achievement—articulating Christian thought both as a cohesive, systematic philosophical worldview and as a deeply personal spirituality—set the groundwork for all subsequent developments in philosophy and theology in western Europe over the next thousand years, exercising nearly as great an influence on the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century as he did on his own Catholic tradition in the fifth century.
Augustine’s personal background shapes the City of God in several pronounced ways. His father, Patricius, was a pagan, while his mother, Monica, was a Christian, meaning that Augustine grew up with both religious contexts. Since the relation between these two religious traditions is the central concern of City of God, Augustine is uniquely positioned to write about them. As a young man, after a period of dissolute living, Augustine became interested in the Manichaean religious tradition. Though he would later recant Manichaeism and argue against its chief tenets, its focus on the dynamic interrelationship between good and evil likely prepared him to think about moral and speculative philosophy in a way that highlighted the distinctive perspective of the Christian tradition on the issues of evil, suffering, and the sovereignty of God.
His theological perspective was further shaped when, as a bishop, he engaged in debates (conducted through published treatises) with Pelagius, who advocated a theology that emphasized human responsibility to the degree that God’s sovereignty was called into question. This led Augustine to craft a serious defense of the doctrine of divine sovereignty, which is especially evident in City of God’s treatment of human volition and the problem of evil.
Augustine’s intellectual training also influenced his composition of City of God. Before his conversion to Christianity, he studied at Carthage and became a prominent professor of rhetoric in both Rome and Milan. This rhetorical background served him well in his writing. As a master of Latin style, he constructed arguments in a logical, well-structured way that appealed to readers and enabled him to treat his subjects with comprehensive analysis. His intellectual training also made him very well-read in the classics of Latin literature, enabling him to interact with the seminal writings of the Roman intellectual tradition throughout City of God.
Augustine’s background was not, however, as complete when it came to the literary heritage written in Greek, so Augustine lacks exposure to some features of the Christian theological landscape as it developed in the Greek-speaking eastern region of the Roman Empire. This led Augustine to articulate an understanding of certain doctrinal points in City of God—such as the idea of original sin and the relations between members of the Trinity—that differed in minor respects from Eastern Christian interpretations, thus introducing cracks between the Eastern and Western Christian traditions that would later widen into a schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.
Historical Context: The Roman Empire
City of God was written in a tumultuous era of transition for the Roman Empire. The Roman state had been an empire for four centuries by Augustine’s time, but its fortunes had been waning for nearly half that time, especially in the West. The empire reached its maximal territorial extent in the second century CE, after which it began to experience incremental losses along its borders and increasing political instability at home. During the third century, this instability reached critical thresholds several times, as the empire struggled to maintain its northern and eastern borders and as new emperors arose by military coups d’états rather than by structured political succession. The city of Rome experienced significant social and political decay, and Roman society responded to these tensions by lashing out at the rising Christian religion.
This trendline of political instability was transformed in the fourth century by the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity, which revolutionized life within the empire. Constantine and his immediate successors not only brought the empire briefly back to heights of unity and stability, but also transformed its social and religious culture. Christians suddenly enjoyed the freedom to practice and promote their faith openly. While Christianity did not become the official state religion of the empire until near the end of the fourth century, all the post-Constantine emperors save one were Christians. The one exception, Julian the Apostate, tried unsuccessfully to orchestrate a revival of civic paganism, and his failure illustrates the shifting of the tides.
The period of stability ushered in by Constantine did not last, and some of the pressures of the third century re-emerged by the end of the fourth. Although the eastern half of the Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, was relatively secure, the western half suffered wave after wave of invasions from Germanic groups. The first major incursions were by the Visigoths and Vandals, groups that were already more “Roman” than many modern readers assume, having served extensively as erstwhile Roman allies in the Balkans and adopting a heretical form of Christianity known as Arianism.
In 410 CE, the Visigoth leader Alaric sacked Rome, an event that overturned long-held assumptions about the city’s security. Even though order was restored shortly thereafter, it still led many in the western Roman Empire to wonder if the adoption of Christianity had somehow made the empire weaker than when it had been pagan. This line of speculation was reinforced by the Visigoths’ and Vandals’ continued incursions, including the Vandal invasion of Augustine’s own home territory in northern Africa. Those speculations formed the questions to which City of God was written as an answer.
Ideological Context: Roman Paganism and Roman Christianity
City of God concerns itself with the tensions between paganism and the rising tide of Christianity. Augustine represents the Christian position, presenting a theological worldview based in the Bible. As a bishop, Augustine was well-suited for the defense of the Christian position. The theological worldview that Augustine articulates is one in which there is only one true God, who is the Creator of all things. One of his underlying premises is that if God is the only true God, then the pagan gods of Rome are false. The true God sovereignly oversees the history of the world and guides it toward the purpose for which he designed it.
Augustine believes the divine purpose is revealed in the histories narrated in the Bible, which tell of God’s relationship with the patriarchs, kings, and prophets of ancient Israel, and the subsequent life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Augustine asserts that Jesus’s ministry reveals that God loves humanity and seeks to draw human beings into an eternal communion of holiness, joy, and peace. It is this union of unending bliss that Augustine paints as the destination of the society of God-followers whom he terms the “city of God.”
The opposing viewpoint is that of Roman paganism, a vast, polytheistic array of beliefs and practices that formed the common religious experience of the Roman people for most of their history. Roman paganism shared much with ancient Greek religion and made widespread use of stories and traditions from around the Mediterranean world. Although it had longstanding traditions about its own pantheon of gods, centered on Jupiter, it was also tolerant of adding many other gods to its system of belief and practice, including deified emperors and abstract concepts (e.g. the goddesses Concord and Felicity, of whom Augustine has much to say in City of God). Roman paganism did not have a canon of scriptures like Christianity, and so there was a broad range of stories and opinions about the nature and behavior of the gods, from theatrical shows that presented the gods as being possessed by shallow human vices, to lofty philosophical speculations about divine nature.
Paganism was not so much defined by a set of beliefs as it was by a set of practices, regulated by temple priesthoods and interwoven in civic life. Offerings of prayers, incense, and sacrifices to the gods were a regular part of Roman life and an important marker of allegiance and goodwill. The assumption was that if you neglected to offer the proper prayers and sacrifices, the god you had spurned might get angry at the city and cause some disaster to befall it. Thus, Christians were persecuted not because of their theological beliefs but because their practices—specifically, abstaining from offering pagan sacrifices—were seen as endangering the civic welfare. This intertwining of paganism and civic responsibility is what led to the backlash against Christianity in Augustine’s day, as people connected their social and political tragedies to the now-widespread failure to keep up the required pagan sacrifices.
