The City of God

This guide refers to the 2003 Penguin Classics edition, translated by Henry Bettenson and edited by G.R. Evans. Your page numbers may vary.

Please note that this guide covers only Part 1 (Books 1-10) of the 22 books of City of God.

Begun in 413 AD, only a few years after the Sack of Rome, City of God is Augustine’s rejoinder to pagan misconceptions of Christianity. In the aftermath of a disastrous and unprecedented attack on Rome by the Vandals, many Roman citizens blamed Christians, saying that the pagan gods demanded sacrifice and worship that the Christian population denied them. In City of God, Augustine replies to these accusations not only by pointing out their inconsistency, but by mounting an attack on pagan religion—and providing a contrasting account of the consolations and truthfulness of Christianity.

Books 1-10 of Augustine’s argument examine the pagan system and finds it both ludicrous and self-evidently unhelpful. Drawing on extensive study, he provides a thorough examination of the pre-Christian history of Rome, which was just as full of disasters, tragedies, plagues, murders, and calamities as post-Christian Rome, and wonders why pagans don’t accuse their own gods of neglect. He also pours scorn on pagan religious ritual, in which pagans placate the gods with theatrical performances that Augustine sees as lascivious and immoral. Roman religious hypocrisy, he observes, is made clear in the fact that Romans see acting in these performances as a lowly thing to do. Why should the gods demand spectacles that even humans can see are somehow shameful?

In contrast to the Roman pantheon, which is full of scandalous behavior and provides no moral instruction, Christianity presents believers not only with clear ethical boundaries but with the promise of a better life to come. As Augustine explains it, the truth of Christianity is in the way it effects the hopes and behavior of believers. Christians have the capacity to go through horrific sufferings like the Sack of Rome (during which many were tortured and raped) with patience, and even allow pain to strengthen them.

Augustine finds a closer approach to truth in the Platonic philosophers, who see God as the Summum Bonum, the ultimate good and the ultimate reality. While Platonists get closer to the truth than most, discerning a monotheistic God, they flinch at the final step: the incarnation of Christ. Augustine provides a step-by-step examination of Platonism’s successes and failures as a philosophy, landing at last on this central issue of embodiment. Platonists and Christians share a sense that the body and its worldly pleasures mustn’t be put at the center of one’s philosophy or morality, but the Platonists have a distaste for the body full stop. Christians, on the other hand, have the example of Christ: By synthesizing divine and human, mortal and immortal, Christ redeems what the Platonists can only reject.

Augustine’s central metaphor is of the City of God: that is, the heavenly city. The city has a dual nature. It’s here on earth right now as the community of Christian believers, whose duty it is to renounce their pride, submit to the will of God, and transmit divine compassion on earth. But it’s also in the life to come. No pagan god, demon, or spirit can take you there, Augustine argues: The only truth is the truth of Christ.