If we are to appreciate the full vision that Augustine lays forth in this monumental work, then we should read it from beginning to end. His writing rewards the patient reader, and following him through the twists and turns of his prose will gain an education in how to think with integrity and intensity from one of the greatest Christian minds ever.

The City of God Against the Pagans, written by Augustine of Hippo, is the single most important work written by a Christian in the antique world. It is a sprawling work that is filled with a variety of different kinds of writing—history, philosophy, literary criticism, political philosophy, comparative religion, dogmatic theology, and extended biblical exegesis, among others—that make it very hard to categorize. Christians have increasingly turned to it as a major work of political theology. In the first instance it is not a work of politics—it is a thoroughly theological undertaking—but that does not mean it doesn’t speak to how Christians should think about politics. The lines between theology and politics for Augustine are very thin and often overlapping. He moves between them freely.

But it is the grand scope, capaciousness, and ambition of the work that make it so breathtakingly brilliant. No writer, except for Origen, had set out to accomplish such a grand undertaking. In fact, in the preface to his work, Augustine refers to City as a “great and arduous” work, showing he self-consciously set out to write a masterpiece. And, it may be concluded, that he succeeded. In approaching a book so large, unwieldy, and complex it helps to have some background context to its composition as well as literary, structural, and thematic elements to guide the reader and help them get their hands on what is going on. After we address some of the basic features of the work, we will conclude with some observations of how Augustine’s thinking shaped politics after him.

History

The context in which Augustine begins to write City of God is essential for understanding the nature of the work. In August, 410 AD, the city of Rome was sacked over a couple of days by the Gothic king Alaric, who led an army of Goths down the Italian peninsula to Rome. Relatively speaking, the sack was not severe, though Christians were raped and killed in the process of city being looted. Many people fled from Rome to Carthage, which was one of the major cities of the empire, and probably shared stories with Augustine, the bishop in nearby Hippo Regius. In his Retractions, written at the end of his life, Augustine states that in the aftermath of the sack, pagans (most likely aristocratic pagans), began to blame the sack and the recent troubles facing Rome on the Christian God. The basic argument, which Augustine takes up in the early chapters of Book 1 of City, directly addresses the question of how the Christian God could allow Rome to be sacked and attacks the assertion that the Roman gods were more trustworthy.

The book is dedicated to Flavius Marcellinus, an imperial tribune (a commander of a military regiment) and chancery (high ranking imperial official) who was a Christian and friend of Augustine. He exchanges letters with Marcellinus who says he needs a response to pagan aristocrats and politicians who are blaming Christianity for Rome’s sack. But the criticisms of Christianity and its relationship to the empire open into much more complex questions about suffering, the nature of virtue, divine providence, the relationship between religion and politics, the Christian view of history, and the nature of pagan religion, among many others. The readers for this work would have been well-educated Christian aristocrats, such as Marcellinus, church leaders, theologians, and learned Christians as well as another pagan aristocrat, Volusianus, who wrote a letter to Augustine in 411 posing critical questions about the relationship of Christianity to Roman politics.

The sack of Rome does not constitute the end of the Roman Empire nor the beginning of the end. Many read City with the impression that Augustine believed the empire was coming to an end. He did not. The Western part of the empire, which encompasses parts of the North African coastline and most of what we would consider Western Europe (Italy, Spain, France), was experiencing a time of instability and would continue to experience instability until the fall of the city of Rome in 476 and the slow collapse of the Western Empire after that, though the collapse was gradual and not sudden. However, none of the Romans believed the empire was nearing its end. Throughout its history, the empire would ebb and flow. It would go through periods of decline and decay (like it experienced in the third century), but also periods of renewal, like it experienced in the late third and early fourth century.

The sack of Rome did send shockwaves throughout the empire. Rome was no longer the seat of political power in the late empire; that title belonged to Constantinople. Still, Rome was the symbolic capital and its sacking was a major psychological blow to the Roman psyche. They presumed the Roman empire was a permanent fixture of the political world, but it was not.

The work Augustine started in 411 AD took the rest of his life to complete—he likely finished around 426–27. We know it was written and probably disseminated in portions. Books 1–3 are written as one unit between 411–13. Books 4–5 were written in 415. Books 6–10 were written in 417. This comprises the first ten books of City, which is the first half of the work. The second half of the work (Books 11–22) is more difficult to track, though we are able to pin some dates to references in the work.

Lastly, we should note that Augustine was constantly embroiled in theological controversies of the most intense kind. Doctrinal controversies in contemporary American evangelicalism pale in comparison to those in the antique world. Three heresies—Arianism, Donatism, and Pelagianism—would occupy vast sums of Augustine’s time and energy. The nature of Christ as second person of the Trinity is the most important question addressed in the Arian controversy. Donatism dealt with the nature of the church and, in particular, the sacraments. Pelagianism brought to the fore the role of grace and works in salvation. Not surprisingly then, Augustine addresses these heresies in different ways throughout City, because he is battling these heresies as he is writing this work.

Literary Genre

In order to grasp the meaning of Augustine’s work, we must understand the sort of literary genre he was using. Most of Augustine’s writings fall into a couple different categories. The most common is the sermon. Augustine was a preacher and one of the most skilled rhetoricians of his day. Though he was known for being a brilliant theologian, it was his rhetorical skills that earned him greater popularity during his lifetime.

Another form of literary genre that he was known for was the philosophical dialogue, which we see deployed in his earlier works. Reminiscent of Platonic dialogues, Augustine would use the form of dialectical enquiry as a means to explore particular questions.

Theological treatises, often written in a polemical fashion, were another common literary form that he would deploy, often against his opponents. Augustine also wrote biblical commentaries on different books of the Bible. City of God does not fit neatly into any of these, though it deploys aspects of these throughout.

Scholars have argued that the genre of literature City of God most closely reflects is the apology, a common literary form used to defend the Christian faith and criticize heresy and non-Christian beliefs. Our word for “apologetics” derives from this original meaning. Apology is one of the earliest and most common types of Christian literature, since the early church was constantly struggling against false beliefs and practices faced by Christians around the Roman Empire. In the preface, Augustine states that he has “undertaken to defend [the City of God] against those who favor their own gods,” making it clear that he is going to offer an apology for the City of God.

At the end of Book 1, after he has made an initial series of arguments refuting the critics of Christianity, Augustine offers a preview for his grand work. Augustine gestures to the idea of the two cities in the preface and repeats it in chapter 35 of Book 1, declaring the goal of his work will be to show “their rise and progress and appointed end.” Chapter 36 offers a preview for the first ten books, which is a sustained argument against Roman civic religion and various forms of Neoplatonic-influenced religions. The second half of City (Books 11–22) traces the biblical narrative of the two cities from their inception with the fall of the angels to the final judgment. The second half is less straightforwardly apologetic, though Augustine has made it clear that the key to responding to pagan arguments against Christianity is understanding the two cities.

Structure

Augustine lays out a clear structure to City of God and continually refers to this structure throughout. There are two halves. Books 1–10 comprising his polemic against Roman religion and Books 11–22 on his narrative explanation of the origin, rise, and ends of the two cities. At the same time, these halves are self-consciously broken up into smaller sections. Books 1–5 specifically focus on what we call Roman civic religion, which is the various civic deities and cultic rituals, celebrations, and practices that were a part of them. The civic religion was core to Roman social life and the arguments against Christians after the sack of Rome were, in part, rooted in beliefs about the role of the gods in defending the city. So, Augustine felt compelled to attack the Roman civic religion.

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