This past year I read the first volume of St. Augustine of Hippo’s City of God, the great theological opus by one of the great Doctors of the Church. Given that the entire City of God is a 1000 pages or so, it’s not a surprise that William Babcock divided his translation into two volumes. The first volume is comprised of the first ten “Books” (what we might call chapters, Augustine calls books), and it’s actually a very natural dividing point. Augustine himself divides his work at Book 10 as well. Part 1 deals with the pagan thought and theology, while Part 2 deals with the Judeo-Christian thought and theology.
I’m only going to compose this one post for this first volume. I may at some point post some notable quotes from the book.
Two cities are at the heart of this work, the city of man and the city of God. It should not be a surprise that Augustine values the city of God over that of man, but how he gets there is a feat of extraordinary composition. He reconstitutes all of Greco-Roman history, theology, and philosophy and then deconstructs the fallacies which led to the formation of the city of man.
The occasion for writing City of God was the sack of the city of Rome in 410. Rome, as a physical polis, had already deteriorated by the beginning of the fourth century. The capital of the empire had been moved to Constantinople. Even the center of the west had moved from Rome to Milan and Ravenna. The resources for maintaining the infrastructure went elsewhere, and so it was an aging city. But psychologically it was still the eternal city, the heart and soul of their culture, their founding roots.
So when the news that their founding city had been sacked, pillaged, and destroyed, it came as a trauma to their sense of being. It was akin to how we Catholics felt when the Cathedral of Notre Dame burned and was thought to have been destroyed. It was a cultural symbol of all we hold dear and share, and was a defining image of the decline we had been experiencing and sensing. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths was the first time the city of Rome had been invaded by outsiders in 800 years. That time before was by the Gauls in 390 B.C, and Rome then vowed to never be weak again and to be on their guard for any threatening force again. It was that historical disgrace that generated an expansionist mentality in the Roman culture through legends of how their lack of virtue had led to that sack. Years later, Virgil would take up the legend of their developed virtue and put forth that their empire was a result of Roman virtue.
So with any monumental failure, the politicians and, indeed, the voice of the people sought blame. It had only been less than a century since Rome had been Christianized, and the remaining pagans, who looked at their glorious history before Christianity accused Christianity as the root cause of the sack and increasing sense of a coming fall of the west. [By the way, central thesis of Edward Gibbons’s, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a very famous work, is just that, Christianity was to blame. Despite its fame as a work of history, it’s dead wrong.] The occasion for City of God, begun in 412, then was a defense of Christianity against the charges of the pagans. St. Augustine would complete the work in 426.
William
Babcock quotes this from City of God
as its central thesis:
Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city. (XIV, 28)
Now it’s not so simple to say that the earthly city stands for the pagans and the heavenly city stands for the Christians—Augustine is way more complex than that—but the earthly city does encapsulate those who lack virtue and the heavenly city does encapsulate those who live by virtue. And Augustine will argue, Christianity was the means of which virtue, which had faded in pagan Rome, was re-introduced into society, and therefore could not be the reason for the sack of Rome in 410.
Just as the pagan gods are rejected, so too is pagan theology examined and rejected. Pagan theology fails to instruct man to salvation, and therefore could not be the source of Roman success. You could think of it as coincidental but not causative. At the heart of Augustine’s argument is that the pagan gods are false because as he demonstrates they do not control the natural world. In every tenet pagan theology that Augustine takes up he goes on to show either an inconsistency in logic, a lack of any efficacy in the ritual, or a monstrous immorality with the gods and rituals. In turn he concludes that the pagan gods are either just reflections of man’s inner fancies or outright demons that have induced their worship.
Pagan philosophy is also examined and refuted. Augustine refutes the pagan philosophic underpinning to the divine, first acknowledging the Platonists similarity to Christianity and then showing they actually worship many gods. Augustine then turns to undermining the validity of Apuleius’ claim that demons serve as intermediaries between gods and men, and finally Augustine rebuts the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus on his magical creation of gods and how they are rooted in dead men, not a transcendent Being.
In
Book X’s closing paragraph, Augustine summarizes what he was trying to do in
Part 1 and projects what he will do in Part 2.
In these ten books, then, even if less fully than a few people expected of us, we have satisfied the desires of some, so far as the true God and Lord has deigned to give us his help, by refuting the objections of the ungodly, who prefer their own gods to the founder of the holy city which we have undertaken to discuss. Of these ten books, the first five were written against those who suppose that the gods are to be worshiped for the sake of the goods of this life, and the last five against those who hold that the worship of the gods should be maintained for the sake of the life to come after death. Next, as we promised in the first book, I shall set forth, so far as I am aided by God, what I judge should be said about the origin, the course, and the due ends of the two cities, which are, as we have said, deeply interwoven and mixed together in this world.
So Augustine ends Part 1 by rejecting the pagan notion of sacrifice as a means of obtaining happiness and showing how it is a dead end while Christianity the true sacrifice was obtained by Christ the real mediator with God so that our souls can ultimately reach beatific union. One can see how then it all fits together.
I have to admit I was intimidated to read this magnificent opus, but I found it highly readable ad profoundly captivating. But I am an ancient Roman history buff. Perhaps it was this translation. I can’t speak to the accuracy of Babcock’s translation—it does feel like Augustine is writing, albeit in English—but it is well annotated, well footnoted, and a real scholarly work. I can’t wait to read Volume II.
###
Here is what I composed as a short central thesis of each of the ten Books from Volume 1. Of course it’s as I read it, and so it may not be the perfect summary.
Book
I
My take as the central thesis of Book I, then, is that the sack of Rome cannot be seen as punishment from God because it is not clear that events in history can be discerned to God’s will. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people. Any event can be seen as a test from God, a punishment from God, or a result of collateral damage of an overarching movement of God’s will to shape history.
Book
II
Book II was absolutely fascinating. Picking up from Book I, where Augustine delineates historical events in the life of Rome, showing that good and bad things happen to both good and bad people, Augustine outlines the history of Rome as a failure of the Roman people to maintain virtue, and that the deities on which they believed failed first to provide a moral foundation and second were actual examples of lack of virtue. The gods themselves were the source of degradation. The gods then were no gods but demons.
Book
III
I would summarized Book III as the following: all the evils that occurred to the Roman people prior to Augustus, and therefore prior to Christ, were never prevented by the pagan gods, and at their root was the sinful, even shameful, nature of the Roman people.
Book
IV
I would summarized Book IV as the following: the success and happiness of the Roman people had nothing to do with the pagan gods, who at best did not exist and at worst were demons in disguise. The success of the Roman people had to do with the one true God who exists and is the source of all goodness.
Book
V
I would summarized Book V as the following: Fate is an illusion because individuals have free will, so Rome’s empire was not acquired from worship of the Roman gods but because the one true God was pleased with Roman virtue and therefore blessed the Roman people with an empire.
Book
VI
Book VI still deals with the pagan gods, but now Augustine develops the philosophy of Roman philosopher, Marcus Terentius Varro, and how his pagan theology fails instruct on what leads men to salvation. Augustine will show how Varro’s three forms of theology, mythic (pertaining to stories of the gods) natural (pertaining to the nature of the gods), and civic (pertaining the relationship of humanity to the gods).
Book
VII
This chapter described rites and rituals of which I was never aware, and Augustine presented the theology behind myths, at least as written by Varro, and as interpreted by Augustine. In every tenet of pagan theology that Augustine takes up he goes on to show either an inconsistency in logic, a lack of any efficacy in the ritual, or a monstrous immorality with the gods and rituals. In turn he concludes that the pagan gods are either just reflections of man’s inner fancies or outright demons that have induced their worship.
Book
VIII
In Book VIII, Augustine refutes the pagan philosophic underpinning to the divine, first acknowledging the Platonists similarity to Christianity and then showing they actually worship many gods. Augustine then turns to undermining the validity of Apuleius’ claim that demons serve as intermediaries between gods and men, and finally Augustine rebuts the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus on his magical creation of gods and how they are rooted in dead men. Augustine concludes with rejecting the claim Christians worship martyrs in the same way.
Book
IX
Augustine in this Book describes the nature of demons
as conceptualized by pagans, and shows they are not the equivalent of
angels. He shows that neither angels nor
demons are mediators to God, and that neither angels nor demons should be
worshipped in any way.
Book
X
In
this magnificent chapter, Augustine takes us from what is true happiness, that
is being united with God in love, through how the pagans and Platonists
(through the philosopher, Porphyry) have misunderstood union with God and
individual purity which brings us to God, and that the true source of are not
demons, who are working against that union, but Christ by His incarnation and
sacrifice. This was a super chapter that
put the entire Part 1 into context.
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