In “The City of God,” Augustine systematically lays bare the empty ideology of the city of man and the Roman empire in a breathtaking counter-narrative that remains remarkably modern and relevant for today. In contrast to the city of man, the City of Love, Augustine argues, is the godly city to which Christians belong and is the city for which Homer and Virgil longed.

Love is the central feature of Augustine’s writings. All humans, irrespective of their state of grace, Augustine argued, desire to love and be loved. The role of love has a direct impact upon the political in Augustine’s political theology since humans are political animals defined by their loves. What people love will become the aim of politics and society.

The Origin of Christian Criticism

The city of man, founded on its love of self, inevitably exhausts itself in its lust for domination and an ethos of coercive domination in (false) hope to satisfy the self. The city of man, therefore, is that “city which aims at domination, which holds nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination.” The city of God, by contrast, rooted in its love of God, promotes cooperation and a hopeful restoration of pre-Fall harmony. As he charts out the two cities in The City of God, it becomes clear that Augustine’s theology is also the first systematic form of cultural critique aimed at exposing the empty ideology and propaganda of altae moenia Romae.

This should not be surprising. Many scholars also recognize the critical project of Augustine’s work. Ernest Fortin notes that the aim of Augustine’s critique was to “unmask [the pagan political system’s] vices.” Peter Brown, likewise, argues that part of The City of God was written to critically examine the hypnotizing “myth of Rome.” By analyzing, deconstructing, and unmasking the vices of pagan Rome, Augustine’s political theology is primarily one of critique. Augustine’s political theology is also deeply dialectical and imaginative: It is based on images of contrast.

Augustine makes known that the city of man is characterized by its desire to satisfy its disordered passions. The city of man “was created by love of self reaching the point of contempt of God.” To understand the city of man, of which all humans are transient citizens, we must ask the question quid sit homo: what is man?

According to Christianity’s doctrine of creation, creatio ex nihilo, the proper understanding of humanity is that humanity ultimately came from nothing. Humanity is only truly human when clothed in grace, but the fall of man has stripped man of his grace and he is now “naked” as Augustine explained. Apart from God, “naked of grace,” man is nothing—man is, to put it mildly, a domineering brute captured by lust which is the privation of love.

To love only the self is to love what one is apart from God—namely, the naked and domineering brute who has no grace covering him. Therefore, the love of self is the love of nothing because it rejects enjoying God and, in the process, rejects self-emptying love and goodness which serves as the groundwork for the harmonious unity of humanity with each other, and with creation, prior to the Fall. Following the Augustinian maxim of becoming what one loves, it is also true that the political comes to promote what its citizenry desires. Culture and politics subsequently inculcate what its citizens love through its apparatuses, institutions, and other structural systems creating a mass society united in such a love. Based on his own experience as a citizen, Augustine most poignantly critiques Roman power and institutional structures which promote and inculcate the love of nothingness.

Deconstructing the Myth of Rome

Augustine recounts his time being formed by the conventions and institutions of Roman society and remarks as to what kind of human Roman institutions and systems had made him. The educational apparatus of the late Western Roman Empire inculcated the love of self into Augustine. As he explains in Confessions, he would lie, cheat, and engage in flattery to win the praises of others who honored him a role model and exemplary student. He stole from his parents to barter and possess the toys of his classmates. The rhetorician that he was, Augustine put his command of speech in the service of slavery rather than truth—to get what he wanted and therefore control others in the process. His actions to win the praise of others was symptomatic of his self-love and self-seeking glory that Roman education instilled into him, and he also acknowledged that the educational system—of which system he was upheld as a sterling exemplar—led him astray from God.

In reading Virgil’s Aeneid and appreciating the deep beauty therein, Augustine learned to weep for Dido and her surrender to the sword all the while he sank lower and lower in his own pit of despair. Jupiter too, his teachers informed him, would punish the wicked; yet, Jupiter constantly engaged in immoral acts himself. From this picture Augustine understood that Roman education was shifting the blame of wickedness to the gods—freeing humans to engage in their base actions. (Here, Augustine begins a long tradition in Christian theology that seeks to demonstrate God as free from evil; evil is a product of human free will and not God’s decrees.) In this way the love of self and the self’s desires to remain inward rather than to serve others was justified through the texts and stories that he learned.

Far from the humanistic education that Cicero advocated, Roman education, whose moral collapse Cicero identified as the cause of the downfall of the Roman republic and its transition into empire, extolled wickedness and self-centeredness as the highest aspiration. Because Roman society loved only the self, Roman society ultimately loved nothing, and it aspired to nothing and promoted this aspiration to its future generations. And the individual who best embodied this love of nothingness was hailed as a great role model to others.

From Augustine’s point of view, Jupiter, then, is not punishing the wicked for transgressions but punished simply out of a display of his own power and egotistical desires. Jupiter does what Jupiter does because he has the power to do so; moral guidance or the moral law is not a factor in Jupiter’s activities. The Roman Empire demonstrates this reality of domineering exploitation by modelling itself on Jupiter Invictus Rex Caelis.

This love of self, Augustine charged, was the reason for the existence of the Roman pantheon. The civic religion of Rome, like its educational system, promoted the love of self, acting on which individuals could win flattery of the people and the approval of the gods. The civic cults only furthered the promotion of self-flattery and egotism above any higher truths or moral rectitude.

As Augustine subsequently mused, if truth or moral fortitude was the aim of Rome, as its defenders often claimed, then why was there not a single shrine to Plato? The Roman gods embodied immorality and thereby sanctioned wicked imitation of the gods. The Roman people became puppets of (immoral) gods. What was most disconcerting for Augustine was that he was formed and instructed to be one of those immoral puppets, and joyfully and willingly embraced that lifestyle for much of his early, pre-conversion life.

One of the constant themes of Roman inculturation, beyond its brutality, was the celebration of death. The Homeric epics, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the stories of Jupiter smiting the immoral with thunderbolts (all the while he engaged in immoral activities himself) all celebrate death and destruction in some manner—a manifestation of humanity’s self-destructive impulses. Perhaps the most tragic example of this praising of nothingness (death) was the rape and suicide of Lucretia whose story was one of the most important founding myths of the Roman people. According to Rome’s mythology, Lucretia’s rape by one of Tarquin’s sons and her subsequent suicide awakened the slumbering sentiments of the Roman people to the tyrannical monarchy and spurred them to overthrow the king. Thus, Lucretia was revered as a virtuous heroine who played a role in the founding of the Roman republic in the place of tyranny.

Leading up to Lucretia’s suicide, Augustine began his commentary on suicide more broadly as a topic. Therein he concluded that suicide is not a viable option for dealing with trauma and the absurdities of life. Suicide is the result of fear of punishment, shame, or guilt. Augustine was perplexed by the dilemma in which Lucretia found herself: Was she chaste or had she committed adultery? As he poignantly asked, “If she is adulterous, why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death?”

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