City of God
De Civitate Dei contra Paganos — Augustine's twenty-two-book theology of history
Tradition: Latin Christianity / political theology
Two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, intermingled through history — the city of God is the people whose love is God's
City of God is Augustine's mature theological masterwork, composed in response to the sack of Rome by Alaric's Goths in 410 — a catastrophe that pagans blamed on the abandonment of the old gods for Christianity. The first ten books refute this charge by reviewing Roman history and theology; the remaining twelve develop a Christian theology of history organised around the contrast between two "cities" — the city of God (whose citizens love God to the contempt of self) and the earthly city (which loves self to the contempt of God) — intermingled throughout history until the final separation at the eschaton. The work shaped medieval political theology (the two-swords doctrine, the relation of church and empire), early modern Reformed political thought, and modern philosophy of history (Hegel, Voegelin).
Author
Editions cited
- City of God (Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics, 1972/2003)
- The City of God against the Pagans (R. W. Dyson, Cambridge, 1998)
- The City of God (Marcus Dods, Modern Library, 1950 reprint of 1871)
School Embodiments
Calvin and the Reformed tradition read the City of God as the principal Latin source for the doctrine of providence, the visible/invisible church distinction, and the theology of election. Calvin quotes Augustine more than any other Christian writer.
"Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self." (City of God XIV.28)
Augustine is the principal Latin theological authority in the Western Catholic tradition; the City of God is the textual basis of medieval political theology and the doctrine of just war.
"Peace is the tranquillity of order." (City of God XIX.13)
Books VIII–X engage Platonist philosophical theology — Augustine treats the Platonists as the philosophical school closest to Christianity, while distinguishing their theology of intermediary daimones from Christian Christology.
"The Platonists have come closer than any other school to our position." (City of God VIII.5)
Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms (geistliches and weltliches Regiment) is a Reformation-era application of Augustine's two cities to the relation of church and civil government.
"The citizens of the earthly city are produced by a nature which is vitiated by sin... the citizens of the heavenly city by a grace which delivers nature from sin." (City of God XV.2)
Twentieth-century political theology — Niebuhr, Yoder, Hauerwas, and parts of liberation theology — engage the City of God as the foundational Christian critique of empire.
"Without justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?" (City of God IV.4)
The City of God develops a theology of the human person in community that twentieth-century Christian personalists (Maritain, Wojtyła) draw on for their account of the common good and human dignity.
"A people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love." (City of God XIX.24)
Augustinian tradition.
Internal Tensions
The City of God's political theology has been read as both critical of empire (the early books on Rome's idolatries) and as legitimating Christian empire (later Carolingian and Ottonian readings). Augustine's strong predestinarianism (XXII.24, on the small number of the elect) is one of the principal sources of the later Catholic-Reformed controversies on grace and free will.
I. Time
History runs from creation to eschaton — book XX develops the most sustained patristic theology of the last judgement. Time is linear, uni-directional, directional toward consummation. God's providence orders all events; secondary causation is real but subordinate.
Attributes
II. Space
The two cities are interwoven in this world's geography. Rome, Jerusalem, Babylon are all real places; the heavenly city is real but not in this space. Substantival, finite, three-dimensional.
Attributes
III. Matter
Created good and conserved; matter is not the source of evil (Augustine's anti-Manichean polemic carries into the City of God). The resurrection of the body is bodily; book XXII's closing image of the perfected body in the new creation is one of the most influential patristic statements.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The Augustinian observer is the divided self of fallen humanity — embodied, plural, passive at the level of salvation (the will is bound; election is unconditional), active at the level of civic life. Knowledge is immediate through Scripture, interior illumination, and the witness of creation. Moral authority is scripture magisterially. Metaphysical agency is unambiguously personal.
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V. Energy
Standard Christian-medieval doctrine of God's continuous causal sustenance of creation.
Attributes
VI. Information
God's eternal foreknowledge is total; the inscribed record of every life is complete in God's knowledge. Personal information is conserved across death and into the resurrection.
Attributes
Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How City of God resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 13 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.