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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.
Part 2, Books 19-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Book 19 Summary
With Book 19, Augustine leaves off his historical analysis and returns to philosophical and theological topics. He takes up the question of good and evil again, now asking how one might define the supreme good of humanity. This line of inquiry will, he hopes, add to the contrasts between the earthly city and the city of God: “My purpose is to make clear the great difference between their hollow realities and our hope” (843).
Augustine reengages with the writings of Varro, who argued that since humanity is both soul and body, the supreme good will be that which brings happiness to both elements, and that virtue has the best claim to that function. Augustine does not dispute the high place of virtue, but disagrees with Varro’s underlying premise that the supreme good is something that can be attained in this life: “[E]ternal life is the Supreme Good, and eternal death the Supreme Evil [...] to achieve the one and escape the other, we must live rightly” (852, emphasis added). Virtue, then, has its place, but is not itself the supreme good.
Augustine then takes his argument on a different track, using the analogy of social relationships as a starting point. He concludes that the best word to characterize the state of the supreme good—that is, the experience of eternal life—is peace, as it is “where our peace shall be so perfect and so great as to admit of neither improvement nor increase” (864-65). He describes the life of the Christian in this world as one lived on pilgrimage, in anticipation of the full and final peace yet to come. This anticipation is ordered by the Christian’s obedience to God’s commands in scripture and by submission to the earthly laws of their societies, so as to keep harmony while in this world. In contrast, the earthly society of Rome has never achieved the true peace and justice that ought to characterize the sort of commonwealth that it aspired to be, since the acquisition of true virtue is impossible without the assistance of God’s grace.
Book 20 Summary
Augustine now turns his attention to eschatology, which is the theology of “last things”—the end of history, the day of judgment, and eternal life. To do so, he returns to biblical interpretation, assessing teachings from Jesus, the apostles’ letters, and the book of Revelation.
Augustine focuses particular attention on a much-disputed passage from Revelation 20 regarding a period called “the millennium,” which will see the binding of Satan and the reign of God’s people. Several interpretations existed on this matter even in the early centuries of Christianity, and Augustine offers one of the most thorough early treatments of the position known as amillennialism, which believes the millennium to refer to the current church age. This is in contrast to the position called premillennialism, which envisions the millennium to be a future time, intermediate between the end of normal history and the final day of judgment. Augustine’s interpretation puts greater emphasis on the nature of the church as it presently exists: “It follows that the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven. And so even now his saints reign with him” (915).
Augustine offers an exposition of some of the more difficult passages of biblical eschatology, including those that refer to the Antichrist, whom Augustine sees as a future figure who will arise before the end. He also interprets some of the Bible’s language about judgments—particularly those that seem to be for the people of God—as denoting purifying punishments. In this, Augustine’s work represents an early articulation of the ideas that will later take shape in the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory. He acknowledges, however, that while he thinks his interpretation of eschatology is persuasive, the events themselves will prove their truth: “All those events, we must believe, will come about; but in what way, and in what order they will come, actual experience will then teach us with a finality surpassing anything our human understanding is now capable of attaining” (963).
Book 21 Summary
Having brought the story of the two cities up to the future day of judgment, Augustine now explores questions relating to their eternal destiny after judgment. In Book 21, he focuses on the eternal destiny of the earthly city. As such, he examines those scriptures that speak about everlasting punishment in hell, considering philosophical questions as to the nature and plausibility of the biblical descriptions.
Augustine appeals to certain natural marvels—animals or events in nature that would be unbelievable if not already observed to be true—to allay any disbelief at difficult ideas, such as the idea that material bodies could persist through an everlasting torment. He also returns to the question of whether the punishment fits the crime, arguing that since sin is the reproach of an infinite good, it merits an infinite punishment in response.
Against some universalist hopes that were present in early Christianity, Augustine finds no evidence in the scriptures to suggest that the punishments are merely purificatory or that all people will eventually be saved. Nonetheless, he admits that the punishment’s severity will be tempered by the nature of each person’s offense: “[T]he eternal fire itself will be proportionate to the deserts of the wicked, which differ though all alike are evil; and for some it will be milder, for others more severe” (994).
Book 22 Summary
Augustine’s final book examines the ultimate destiny of the city of God, an eternal life of bliss in God’s own presence. He begins by defending the biblical doctrine of the resurrection of the body: that at the day of judgment, all will be raised in an eternally embodied state, not merely as souls. To those who find this doctrine unbelievable, Augustine remarks that it is even more unbelievable to suppose that the whole world would put its faith in this doctrine, and yet that is precisely what has come to pass. Christians, he says, can point to evidence for a mountain of incredible things that have already happened, so it does not stretch credulity to suggest that God might do another incredible thing by raising the dead.
Among the evidence he presents are accounts of miracles, both in biblical history and in his contemporary experience. Augustine recounts at length several miracle stories of which he was either an eyewitness or a secondary observer. Many of these miracles occurred at the shrines of Christian martyrs or through intercessions made to them, which Augustine counts as evidence that those martyrs already share in the promised everlasting life.
Augustine then deals with a miscellaneous set of questions that arise concerning the resurrection of the dead, ranging from whether miscarried babies share in the resurrection (he thinks they will) to whether scripture implies that all resurrection bodies will look like Jesus’s physical body (he thinks not). This underscores yet again the comprehensive nature of his treatment, seeking to answer all possible responses.
He then closes his reflections with a long paean on the many evident blessings God has given us in this life, arguing that if we judge by those blessings alone, we can expect that the blessings of the life to come will surpass even our capacity to imagine them. There we will receive the supreme good, the height of all possible happiness, by beholding God and delighting in his glory: “He will be the goal of all our longings; and we shall see him forever; we shall love him without satiety; we shall praise him without wearying” (1088).
Books 19-22 Analysis
In this final section, Augustine continues the main thread of Part 2—tracing the two cities through history—by looking not at the past, but at what their stories will be in the future. This leads him into more philosophical and theological digressions than in the previous two sections of Part 2, but much of the content picks up on ideas that he raised in Part 1.
He resumes some of his earlier rhetorical strategies, as when he takes Varro as a debate partner again in Book 19. He once more aims for comprehensiveness, particularly when addressing speculations about eschatological questions. The biblical portrayal of final judgment tends to be clear in its broad outlines, but with plenty of room for multiple interpretations regarding specific details, and so Augustine takes the opportunity to answer every question that he thinks a pagan inquirer might ask about the exact nature, plausibility, and coherence of the biblical picture of final judgment.
A final rhetorical strategy he employs is his portrayal of the ultimate destiny of the city of God in terms that will appeal to a cultural context steeped in Greco-Roman philosophy. The biblical picture of heaven is suffused with wonder and beauty, but it is set in images that derive mostly from the temple theology of Jewish culture. Augustine tends not to use that imagery in his presentation, because it would not be as meaningful to his audience. Instead, he translates it into a conceptual picture that is both faithful to the biblical idea of heaven and meaningful to his Greco-Roman readers. Thus he portrays the ultimate destiny of Christians in philosophical terminology relating to the ideas of the supreme good, felicity, and order. Heaven, in Augustine’s portrayal, is the eternal experience of beholding truth, goodness, and beauty in the person of God, of delighting in him and in the sovereign beneficence by which he rules a rightly-ordered universe of endless peace and harmony.
The motif of pilgrimage receives a great deal of attention in this section, as Augustine draws his final contrasts between the earthly city and the city of God, the latter of which is merely passing through its journey here, on the way to its ultimate destiny in heaven. Two of the three major themes are likewise evident in these final books. Here there is the outcome of God’s Sovereign Plan in History, as each city is assigned to its eternal end. Augustine also embarks on another exploration of the idea of evil, especially in regard to the punishment of sin. He does not address the final theme, The Folly of Pagan Religion, in any great depth here, since his main point in this section is the defense of the Christian position. That defense, however, makes it clear once again that he regards Christianity to be far more reasonable, moral, and beautiful than paganism.
