The City of God

“The Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.”

Augustine uses this passage to encourage his readers to prize their citizenship in the city of God rather than in the earthly city. He uses a rhetorical trick here, declaring the relationship between the two to be “beyond comparison,” but then going on to list a series of comparisons to illuminate the contrast between the values of Roman society and the blessings of Christianity.

“I would therefore have our adversaries consider the possibility that to rejoice in the extent of empire is not a characteristic of good men. […] The empire would have been small indeed, if neighboring peoples had been peaceable, had always acted with justice, and had never provoked attack by any wrong-doing. In that case, human affairs would have been in a happier state; all kingdoms would have been small and would have rejoiced in concord with their neighbors.”

In this passage, Augustine is pushing back against a widely-accepted premise that the vast extent of the Roman Empire was self-evidently a good thing, a cause for patriotic pride. Augustine suggests that the growth of empires is a symptom of imperfect conditions, and perhaps even of malign intentions. A political state would be more deserving of pride if it lived in peace with its neighbors than if it perpetually extended its borders.

“[I]f the pagan books and rites are true, and Felicity is a goddess, why is it not established that she alone should be worshiped, since she could confer all blessings and, in this economical fashion, bring a man happiness?”

Here we see one of Augustine’s tactics for exposing The Folly of Pagan Religion. Critiquing the pagan habit of deifying abstract concepts like “felicity,” which refers to a state of happiness and wellbeing, Augustine points out that attaining felicity is essentially the goal of all religious practice. If Felicity were a goddess, she would be the only goddess one would need, and thus paganism points toward monotheism as a more sensible alternative.

“For our part, whatever may be the twists and turns of philosophical dispute and debate, we recognize a God who is supreme and true and therefore we confess his supreme power and foreknowledge. We are not afraid that what we do by an act of will may not be a voluntary act, because God, with his infallible prescience, knew that we should do it.”

This quote is part of Augustine’s treatment of the sovereignty of God and its interaction with human free will. In contrast to the determinism implicit in astrology, Augustine argues that God’s sovereignty does not impinge on the reality of human free will. God’s sovereign plan for the universe takes into account his perfect foreknowledge of all future events, which necessarily includes the free actions of humans as proximate causes in the chain of events.

“[W]e may ask whether we are really prepared to ask or hope for eternal life from the gods of poetry and the theatre, the gods of the games and the plays? A thousand times, no! The God of truth forbids that we should entertain such monstrous, blasphemous insanity. What! Are we to seek eternal life from gods who are pleased and appeased by shows at which scandalous stories about them are enacted for all to see?”

Here Augustine points out again The Folly of Pagan Religion, arguing that gods who are depicted as being consumed by passions like lust, greed, and selfish ambition are not worthy of worship. This quote also shows Augustine’s training as a rhetorician, with exclamations of astonishment that make it read more like a speech than a treatise.

“The God of our worship is he who has created all beings, and ordered the beginning and end of their existence and their motion. He has in his hands the causes of all that exists; and all those causes are within his knowledge and at his disposition.”

Augustine is claiming here that only the one supreme God is worthy of worship. He offers two points to consider in making this claim: first, that God is the creator of all things, and second, that God continues to be completely sovereign over them all. Since he is both the source and governor over everything, it makes little sense to devote worship to lesser gods.

“When we were overwhelmed by the load of our sins, when we had turned away from the contemplation of his light and been blinded by our love of darkness, even then he did not abandon us. He sent to us his Word, who is his only Son, who was born and who suffered in the flesh which he assumed for our sake—so that we might know the value God placed on mankind, and might be purified from all our sins by that unique sacrifice.”

Since Augustine is writing a defense of Christianity, he takes frequent opportunities to express the basic message of its call to faith. In this passage, he recounts the gospel message at the core of Christianity, putting special emphasis on the individual experience of sin and forgiveness that would become a hallmark of the Western Christian tradition.

“The teaching of both these theologies, the ‘fabulous’ and the ‘civil,’ must yield place to the doctrine of the Platonists; for the Platonists assert that the true God is the author of the universe, the source of the light of truth, and the bestower of happiness.”

In this quote, Augustine points out that even within the Greco-Roman religious tradition, the best thinkers (in this example, the Platonists) have come to the conclusion that there is one supreme God. As such, Augustine suggests that other forms of religious thought, like the polytheism espoused in the myths and by the temple establishments, should cede their place to the more sensible position of monotheism.

“For our Good, that Final Good about which the philosophers dispute, is nothing else but to cleave to him whose spiritual embrace [...] fills the intellectual soul and makes it fertile with true virtues. We are commanded to love this Good with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength […]. This is the worship of God; this is true religion; this is the right kind of devotion; this is the service which is owed to God alone.”

Augustine’s skill as a rhetorician comes out here, as he uses repetition to give his prose a sense of poetic beauty. His depiction of faith in God is set in the terminology of Greco-Roman philosophy, but he also pairs this with an allusion to scripture (Deuteronomy 6:5), which illustrates Augustine’s skill in creating a synthesis of biblical interpretation and philosophical reasoning.

“In fact his wisdom is multiple in its simplicity, and multiform in its uniformity. It comprehends all incomprehensible things with such incomprehensible comprehension that if he wished always to create new things of every possible kind, each of them unlike its predecessor, none of them could be for him undesigned and unforeseen, nor would it be that he foresaw each just before it came into being; God’s wisdom would contain each and all of them in his eternal prescience.”

This is one of Augustine’s statements about the sovereignty and creativity of God. Augustine takes the attribute of God’s infinite nature and his role as Creator, and spins those two aspects of God’s being into a depiction of the wonders God could perform he chose to do so. The rhythmic wordplay of repeating different versions of “comprehend” illustrates Augustine’s stylistic strengths as a writer, choosing expressions that make his prose sound almost poetic.

“God created man aright […]. But man was willingly perverted and justly condemned, and so begot perverted and condemned offspring. […] Hence from the misuse of free will there started a chain of disasters: mankind is led from that original perversion, a kind of corruption at the root, right up to the disaster of the second death, which has no end.”

This is part of Augustine’s exploration of the problem of evil, in which he attributes evil not to God’s design but to humanity’s free will. The second part of the quote is an expression of the doctrine that would come to be known as “original sin,” which teaches that sin’s power corrupts us in a way that is both inescapable and perpetually transmitted through human generations, offering no way out except by God’s grace. This understanding of sin’s effects became a key concept in the Christian tradition.

“[A]lthough there are many great peoples throughout the world, living under different customs in religion and morality and distinguished by a complex variety of languages, arms, and dress, it is still true that there have come into being only two main divisions, as we may call them, in human society. […] There is, in fact, one city of men who choose to live by the standard of the flesh, another of those who choose to live by the standard of the spirit.”

In this quote, Augustine offers one of his fullest explanations of his use of “city” to denote the two communities of people in the world. He makes clear that the earthly city and the city of God are not literal cities like Rome, but rather societies of people who live all around the world and are only distinguished from each other by whether they follow God’s ways or not. Rome is therefore used as symbolic shorthand for pagan societies.

“[T]he man who lives by God’s standards […] should not hate the person because of the fault, nor should he love the fault because the person. He should hate the fault, but love the man.”

Here we have the first statement of a famous maxim: “Love the sinner but hate the sin.” As Augustine explains the principle behind the idea, it becomes clear that true love for the other person cannot affirm or encourage that person’s sin, because to do so would actually be an unloving act. Love is to desire what is best for the other person, and the best for any person is to find freedom from their sin through the grace that God offers, while to leave them abandoned to the power of their sin would effectively be an act of hatred.

“We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in its Lord.”

The distinction between the two cities, Augustine explains here, comes down to where it sets the center of its affections. Essentially, every person has the option to either choose themselves as the ultimate focus of their lives, or to choose God. For Augustine, this is a clear distinction and there are no other choices—a rejection of God necessarily means that one is choosing an exalted supremacy for oneself, which is the defining posture of the earthly city.

“It is in hope, therefore, that a man lives, as the ‘son of the resurrection’; it is in hope that the City of God lives, in its pilgrimage on earth, that City which is brought into being by faith in Christ’s resurrection.”

This quote illustrates the importance of the motif of pilgrimage, applied to the condition of the city of God while here on earth (See: Symbols & Motifs). Augustine characterizes the city of God’s perspective as being one of hope, always looking forward to the end of its journey. That hope is already set on a confident standing by the knowledge of Christ’s resurrection and the experience of spiritually sharing in that resurrection by being brought to new life through faith.

“Thus the blessing of Jacob is the proclamation of Christ among all nations. This is happening; this is actively going on. […] The world is filled like a field with the fragrance of the name of Christ.”

One of the sources of evidence to which Augustine most frequently appeals is the Old Testament and the many prophecies recorded there. In these prophecies, written hundreds of years before Christ, Augustine sees clear fulfillments both in the person of Christ and in the present state of the church. This quote references a prophecy about the nations serving Jacob (Genesis 27:29), to which Augustine attributes a fulfillment in the spread of the Christian message around the world.

“In this manner the Church proceeds on its pilgrim way in this world, in these evil days. Its troubled course began not merely in the time of the bodily presence of Christ and the time of his apostles; it started with Abel himself, the first righteous man slain by an ungodly brother; and the pilgrimage goes on from that time right up to the end of history, with the persecutions of the world on one side, and on the other the consolations of God.”

This is perhaps Augustine’s fullest statement on the motif of pilgrimage, which he references throughout City of God (See: Symbols & Motifs). It envisions the life of the church as a perpetual journey characterized both by blessings and sufferings. Since this dynamic has been true of God’s people all throughout history, Augustine argues, it should be no surprise that Christians in his own day were encountering sufferings.

“And therefore, [the city of God] leads what we may call a life of captivity in this earthly city as in a foreign land, although it has already received the promise of redemption, and the gift of the Spirit as a kind of pledge of it; and yet it does not hesitate to obey the laws of the earthly city by which those things which are designed for the support of this mortal life are regulated.”

Even while Augustine paints a picture of Christians as a community who are passing through this world and whose citizenship lies elsewhere, he does not want his readers to get the impression that this makes Christians bad citizens of their earthly societies. Even though it is true that Christians are strangers in this world, they still follow the laws of the societies in which they find themselves, in part because they believe that a life of well-ordered submission to proper authority is part of one’s larger submission to the sovereignty of God.

“It follows that justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient City according to his grace, forbidding sacrifice to any being save himself alone; and where in consequence the soul rules the body in all men who belong to this City and obey God, and the reason faithfully rules the vices in a lawful system of subordination.”

Augustine argues that Rome (and the earthly city as a whole) has never truly experienced the peace and justice for which it strove, in part because such blessings are the result only of dwelling in a society ordered toward God’s gracious sovereignty. Thus, in this quote, Augustine expresses the life of the city of God in terms of willing, joyful submission at every level of existence, and the city receives in return the blessing of true justice—the philosophical value that most fully expresses the wellbeing of a society.

“And we now see fulfilled the last words of prophecy about him: ‘In his name the nations will put their hope.’ […] Who would have expected that the nations would put their hope in Christ, at the time when he was arrested, bound, scourged, ridiculed, crucified […]? The hope that was then held scarcely by the one thief on the cross is now held by nations scattered far and wide, who are signed with the sign of that very cross on which he died, so that they may not die for ever.”

Augustine quotes from a biblical prophecy (Isaiah 42:4) that anticipates a day when all the nations will put their hope in God. Augustine’s belief that this has come about—via the global spread of faith in the God of Israel, through the message of Jesus Christ—is one of Augustine’s leading pieces of evidence affirming Jesus’s claims. He notes here just how unlikely the fulfillment of that prophecy must have seemed at the moment of Jesus’s crucifixion.

“It is, in fact, God himself who has created all that is wonderful in this world, the great miracles and the minor marvels which I have mentioned; and he has included them all in that unique wonder, that miracle of miracles, the world itself.”

This quote demonstrates the beauty of Augustine’s style, upheld by the repetition of words and the rhythmic separation of phrases, which add a poetic quality to the text. Here Augustine hopes to evoke a sense of wonder at God’s creative work, and to make the point that if we truly were to consider all the many everyday miracles around us, we would not find the miraculous claims of Christianity unbelievable at all.

“From this life of misery, a kind of hell on earth, there is no liberation save through the grace of Christ our Saviour, our God and our Lord. His name is Jesus; and Jesus, we know, means Saviour. And, above all, it is his grace which will save us from a worse life, or rather death, after this life; and that death will be everlasting.”

Though Augustine’s mode of describing theology often focuses on the depravity of sin and the reality of judgment, he also consistently reminds his readers that however bad the news of sin and judgment might sound, it must be held against the illuminating contrast of the good news of the gospel message. His desire is not only to convince readers that he is intellectually right about Christianity, but to inspire them to seek the gift of salvation that God offers through Christ.

“Then there is the beauty and utility of the natural creation, which the divine generosity has bestowed on man […]. How could any description do justice to all these blessings? […] And these are all the consolations of mankind under condemnation, not the rewards of the blessed. What then will those rewards be, if the consolations are so many and so wonderful?”

In this quote, Augustine uses a mode of argumentation familiar to Christians because of its frequent use in the New Testament—a rhetorical strategy employed by first-century rabbis like Jesus, called the “how much more” argument (in Hebrew, called “Qal va-homer”). Essentially, it points out a truth that is universally acknowledged (here, the beauty and blessings of the natural world) and then asks its audience to imagine how much more that same pattern will hold true when scaled up to the scope of God’s eternal plans for humanity.