The Enduring City of God

St Augustine wrote The City of God when the Empire was under attack by the barbarians. Today their descendants are attacking Christendom.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Why did St. Augustine write "The City of God"? Why should it continue to compel our attention today?

It was the one project St. Augustine prized above all others and would spend fourteen years of his life putting it all together: The City of God. He finished the last of the twenty-two books in the year 426, just two years before the barbarians reached North Africa, laying siege to Hippo where he, its saintly bishop, would himself die two years later, in August of 430. Almost at once, the work achieved near legendary status and is today regarded as one of the great and enduring classics of world literature. It is like one of those amazing crop dusters that covers everything in sight, managing with seeming effortlessness to canvass not only the pagan cosmology upon which the religion of Rome rested but the impact of the Christian alternative that would blow it all to pieces.

Of course, not everyone was edified. Edward Gibbon, for instance, animated by his usual scorn for all things Catholic, airily dismissed the entire effort on the grounds that, “His learning is too often borrowed and his arguments are too often his own.” Yet, in the same note, he will concede that in terms of its overall design, one cannot but see a certain “magnificence…not unskillfully executed.”  

The City of God was begun three years after the barbarian sack of Rome in the year 410—thus ending a thousand years of uninterrupted Roman rule—as an answer to the charge, asserted by those fiercely loyal to the empire, that Rome fell owing to the loss of the pagan gods and the consequent rise of Christianity, a canard which Augustine was able deftly to put to rest. But the loss to the pagan world was real enough, and in its very devastation, both widespread and deeply felt, it pays tribute to the importance of those household gods on whose favors the citizenry of Rome depended. Tacitus, the great Roman historian, was not kidding when he said that such grandeur as Rome had and could justly boast of before the world was due neither to the power of her armies, nor the wisdom of her emperors, but only to the temples of her gods.  

And, to be sure, the pagans dutifully fell in line with the pious superstition that thanks to their gods, and the worship they were routinely given, everything of value had come their way. But once Christ came along, of course, setting in motion the conversion of that world, the gods would all have to go. Imperial Rome could no longer count on them to rescue a city that had just fallen into the hands of Alaric and his rampaging Goths.

Leaving Augustine, as it were, to undertake what would be, in the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, “his great life’s work…to salvage from a world in ruins the Christian faith, in order that it might provide the basis for a new, splendid civilization which would grow great and then in time, falter and fail,” as all things mortal do. Faced with the brute fact of dissolution, in other words, Augustine, “like a latter-day Noah, was constrained to construct an ark, in his case, Orthodoxy, wherein his Church could survive through the dark days that lay ahead.”  

Rome, until the moment it fell, appeared by all accounts to be indestructible, resistant to every possible threat. It was unthinkable that so impregnable a fortress could not last forever. And were it to collapse, so men believed, it would leave in its wake only darkness and despair. “Do not lose heart,” Augustine would urge his fellow Christians caught up in the aftershock of Rome’s demise, 

there will be an end to every earthly kingdom. If this is now the end, God sees. Perhaps it has not yet come to that: for some reason—call it weakness, or mercy, or mere wretchedness—we are all hoping that it has not yet come.  

Again, God sees. He knows even as we do not, which is why the virtue of hope, in which we are annealed in Christ, is so vital to the maintenance of Christian morale. And so towering a figure was he, so formative an influence did he have on an age that bears his name, that it is no exaggeration to say, as does the historian Christopher Dawson, “that to a far greater degree than any emperor or general or barbarian war-lord, he was a maker of history and a builder of the bridge which was to lead him from the old world to the new.”

And yet, for all the paradigmatic sweep of his great work, The City of God is not much read these days. Besides a few Great Books Programs scattered about the country, along with the occasional oasis where scholars and professors gather to talk and write about the work of Augustine, who is actually reading it? Certainly not the politicians and statesmen, who stand to gain the most from its wisdom. They would sooner read a meme than a monument. But there was a time when it served as the standard textbook for statesmen and kings all across Europe.  From the time of Charlemagne, that is, who saw it, perhaps mistakenly, as a blueprint for the Heavenly City come down into history, to the period of the Renaissance, in which no one with any pretension to learning and culture could ill-afford not to read it.

But why, exactly, did he write it? And why should it continue to compel our attention?

Well, the first and most obvious reason is that he was asked to do so. “In an atmosphere of public disaster,” writes Peter Brown, “men want to know what to do. At least Augustine could tell them…As a bishop he could claim to have done what no pagan god had done: he had undertaken the moral guidance of a whole community.” 

In the midst of catastrophe on all sides, a Roman official by the name of Flavius Marcellinus, a Christian, had come to North Africa to take stock of the situation. He was, notes Brown, “typical of a new generation of Catholic politicians: baptized, an amateur theologian, austere, completely chaste. Like Augustine,” he adds, “such a man felt ‘press-ganged’ into public service.” And he was most eager to hear all that Augustine had to say.

What sense are men to make of the suffering, of the scale and ferocity of the barbarian invasion? “Rome was the symbol of a whole civilization,” Brown adds. “It was as if an army had been allowed to sack Westminster Abbey or the Louvre.” Or, to rub it into our own noses, Washington, D.C. “The sack of Rome by the Goths,” concludes Brown, “was an ominous reminder of the fact that even the most valuable societies might die. ‘If Rome can perish,’ wrote Jerome, ‘what can be safe?’”

And Augustine, refusing to stand aloof from the encircling storm, “who wished to weep with those who weep,” produces this masterpiece in order to assuage the tears of all who must suffer—and, indeed, to help map a path forward for a new Christendom, one that would baptize not a few of those same barbarians who had destroyed Rome.