In a list of books to read before I die, Augustine’s City of God would rank high on that list. I tried reading it 20 years ago, but I didn’t manage to get very far. Over the years, I considered taking it up again, but… 1,000 pages! I needed a big reason to start this big book. And this year, I found that reason.

Hi, my name is Terence, and I’m your host for Reading and Readers, a podcast where I review Christian books for you. Today, I review City of God by Augustine of Hippo. A famous, famous book, read not by just kings but by emperors. The one I am reading is translated by William Babcock, published by New City Press, in December 2013. This 1000-page book of ancient wisdom is sold as two volumes on Amazon Kindle, for USD9.99 each, and in Logos as a single volume for USD94.99.

Finding a Reason to Complete

This year, I enrolled on a Masters in Divinity program, and I took two courses on Christian History. One is from the Early Church to the Renaissance. And the other is from the Renaissance to the Modern Age. Now, these courses require students to choose and read an influential historical book.

And I thought, “It’s now or never! If I don’t read City of God now, I may never do it.”

So I chose The City of God. If I fail to finish the book, I fail the course. I didn’t fail. After 20 years, I finally finished Augustine’s magnum opus.

Two Parts

The City of God is divided into two parts. Part 1 consists of Books I to X, where Augustine eviscerates pagans who blame Christians for the fall of Rome. Part 2 consists of Books XI to XXII. After Augustine shreds the pagans’ worldview, he tells them the truth. He tells them that there are two cities in the world: the City of God and the City of Man. And this is what they mean.

Part 1 is fun because Augustine harnesses the words of pagan Rome’s most famous poets, historians and generals to devastate their own beliefs. After reading Part I, no pagan believer could sustain their worldview. I have more on that later.

I was most excited to read Part 2 because I thought this would be the Christian’s version of Plato’s Republic. Historians have recorded that the great Emperor Charlemagne himself, a man who couldn’t read, had Augustine’s City of God regularly read to him after dinner. And so, The City of God has frequently been cited as a foundation stone for Western civilisation, so I prepared myself for a robust political treatise.

Then, to my surprise, Augustine’s City of God reads like a volume from the New Studies in Biblical Theology series edited by Don Carson or the Biblical Theology of Life series edited by Jonathan Lunde. It takes one theme and explores what the Bible says about that one theme all the way from Genesis to Revelation. If you excuse the difficult language, which is only difficult because the modern reader is used to short, simple sentences, if you excuse the language, you will find Augustine’s approach feels very modern for those who read Biblical Theology books.

That’s the overview. Let’s dive into Part 1.

Ungrateful Pagans

The very first words of Augustine are:

In this work, my dearest son Marcellinus, I have taken up the task of defending the most glorious city of God, whether in the course of these present times when it is on pilgrimage among the ungodly, living by faith, or in the stability of its eternal home which it now awaits in patience, until justice returns in judgment (Ps 94:15), but will finally attain, by virtue of its surpassing excellence, in ultimate victory and perfect peace. I have undertaken to defend it against those who prefer their own gods to its founder.

This is the setup for a battle. How dare those pagans blame Christians for the fall of Rome! When Alaric of the Goths attacked in 410AD, how dare they say, “If only Rome stayed true to the old gods, Rome would not have fallen!”

Augustine could have replied in one word, “Nuts!” but he instead chose to write 1000 pages in reply.

He first calls out the pagans for their ingratitude. When the Goths sacked Rome, the invaders respected the churches. Augustine calls them out:

… many escaped who now deride these Christian times and make Christ responsible for the evils that Rome endured. But they do not make Christ responsible for the good that happened to them, the fact that they themselves are still alive due to the honour in which Christ was held.

Defeated Gods to Defend Rome?

And to the charge that if only Rome had stayed loyal to the old gods, the old gods would have protected Rome, Augustine replies by destroying those old gods.

Augustine reminds all of us that before Rome, there was Troy. And when Troy was conquered, their gods were brought to Rome. One of those gods was Minerva. Augustine writes:

Nor is it true that Troy perished because it lost Minerva. For what had Minerva herself lost first, with the result that Troy perished? Perhaps it was her guards? That was it, of course. Once her guards were killed, it was possible to take her away. The image was not protecting human beings; human beings were protecting the image. What was the point, then, of worshipping her for the sake of having her guard the country and its people? She could not even guard her own guardians!

It continues:

To think that the Romans used to rejoice that they had entrusted the protection of their city to gods such as these! What a miserable mistake! They are angry with us when we say such things about their gods, and yet they are not angry with their own authors.

Rome’s celebrated author/poet, Virgil, wrote these lines:

To you, Troy entrusts her sacred things and her native gods.

Augustine rips that line up.

Thus, if Virgil says both that these gods were conquered and that, in order somehow to escape despite the fact that they were conquered, they were entrusted to a man, what sort of madness is it to suppose that it was wise to entrust Rome to such guardians as these or to imagine that, if only she had not lost them, she could not possibly have been brought down! To worship conquered gods as protectors and defenders, what is that but to hold fast not to good divinities but to bad defaulters?

Why Blame Christians?

If you know Roman history, literature, and religion, you will love all the references. If you don’t, you can appreciate this huge Roman world and the Romans’ sense of place in history. We are talking about the Roman Empire!

But when the pagans recall the glory days before Christians took over Rome, Augustine reminds them of their own history:

Let them recall with us, then, all the varied disasters that crushed the Roman state before Christ had come in the flesh and before his name became known among the peoples with all the glory that now sparks their fruitless envy. And if they can, let them defend their gods in this regard, assuming it is true that the whole point of worshipping these gods is precisely to keep their worshipers from suffering such evils as these. If they suffer catastrophes now, they claim that we are to blame. Why is it, then, that the gods allowed the disasters I am about to mention to happen to their worshipers long before the proclamation of Christ’s name had caused them to take offence or had put an end to their sacrifices?

Augustine goes on to list the disasters, all the wars, earthquakes, famines, all the times their gods have failed them as recorded by Rome’s own historians! And Augustine calls the mob ignorant, and cites the popular proverb, “No rain? Blame the Christians!” Why would the people need to think when they have already found a target to blame?

Not Worthy of Worship

Not only were the Roman gods unable to protect their worshippers, they are not even worth worshipping. They are immoral. Their gods are petty, they murder, rape and steal, and to make things worse, they require the people to reenact their immoral deeds in the theatres!

Comparing the Roman gods with the Christian’s one true God, Augustine writes:

Let them read to us any commandments against luxury and greed given to the Roman people by their gods. Would that their gods had simply been silent about chastity and propriety and had not demanded from the people those shameful and disgraceful performances, giving them a baneful authority by means of their spurious divinity! In contrast, let them read all our many commandments against luxury and greed, given through the prophets, through the holy gospel, through the Acts of the Apostles, through the epistles, which are everywhere read out to the people assembled for this purpose. How excellent, how divine they sound, not like the noisy uproar of philosophers’ debates but like the tones of God thundering from oracles or from the clouds.

If Augustine was born in the time of Socrates, the two of them would have shared the same prison cell. Socrates was forced to drink the poison hemlock because he disrespected the gods. Augustine would have been forced to drink gallons of the stuff. Listen to this:

Everyone appoints a single doorkeeper for his house, and, because the doorkeeper is a man, that is quite enough. But the Romans appointed three gods for the task: Forculus for the doors, Cardea for the hinges, and Limentinus for the threshold. Forculus, no doubt, was simply incapable of guarding the hinges and threshold at the same time as the door!

I laugh at how Augustine cuts down the pagan worldview. How primitive these people were who worshipped Mars, the God of War, Venus, the Goddess of Love, and Jupiter, the King of the Gods! And yet, every so often, when Augustine throws a punch at them, the blow lands on us today.

Augustine observes:

When evil is enacted, the whole world comes to watch; when good is spoken, scarcely a listener is to be found. It is as if we ought to be ashamed of what is honorable and ought to glory in what is dishonorable.

Don’t you agree? That comment could very well apply to what is on our YouTube and social media.

There is so much in Part 1 about the Romans, and it’s not all bad. Augustine admires the rich history and culture, and even the virtues that make the Romans still so enduring today. But Augustine has something greater than the city of Rome in mind, that is, the city of God.

Augustine concludes Part 1, with these words:

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.

A Good God Makes Good Things

After finishing Part 1, I was so excited to read Part 2.

We start at the beginning, at the creation of the world. Augustine says that the greatest philosophers, through deep thought, without heavenly revelation, came so close to the Truth. Augustine writes:

No maker is more excellent than God, no design is more efficacious than God’s Word, and no reason why is better than that something good should be created by a good God. Plato also gives this as the most supremely just reason for creating the world—that good works might be made by a good God. Plato may have read this passage of Scripture; or he may have come to know of it from those who had read it; or, with his acute insight, he may have understood and seen the invisible things of God through the things that God made; or he may himself have learned of them from those who had seen them.

Augustine’s suggestion here, he might be serious or playful, I don’t know, but his idea that Plato may have gotten his insight from Scripture, would mean that all the wonderful things we have credited to Plato, all the schools and scholars that came after Plato, should have given credit to Plato’s source, namely God’s revelation. Good works are made by a good God.

The Cause of the First Evil Will

But with this statement comes the inevitable challenge. If there is a good God, then why is there evil? And this question is one that Augustine explores in depth and length.

The translator, William Babcock, has made the length slightly manageable by including subheadings. Let me read the first few sub-headings in Book XII.

First, The Difference between the Good and Evil Angels: not Nature but Fault.
Second, The Cause of the First Evil Will
Third, The Cause of the Good Will of the Good Angels

Can you see why I was caught off guard by this? I thought, in Augustine’s City of God, I would read a Christian version of Plato’s Republic. Something about politics, the role of kings and emperors, the goal of the state, and how to achieve those goals.

Instead, I find myself reading Augustine’s answer to the perennial question, “Why does Evil exist? Where does Evil come from?”

He writes:

No one, therefore, should look for an efficient cause for an evil will. For it is not an efficient but rather a deficient cause, because the evil will itself is not an effect but rather a defect. For to defect from what has supreme existence to what has lesser existence is itself to begin to have an evil will. And since the causes of such defections, as I have said, are not efficient but rather deficient causes, to want to discover such causes is like wanting to see darkness or to hear silence.

There is a lot here which demands more thought and more background than this book review can give because Augustine covers a lot more topics than the Problem of Evil.

In Part 2, Augustine is establishing a foundation for scholars centuries after to build on. Today, whether you are a Christian or not, if you are going to seriously study the Problem of Evil, you will encounter Augustinian concepts and arguments.

The Earthy City is Not the Kingdom of Darkness

But if Part 2 is a theological work of abstract nouns, why would savvy political operators and emperors read this? The genius literary device is to frame the book as a choice between the City of Man and the City of God. Assuming that Augustine is right, that his idea is truly founded in Scripture, then this idea rallies Christians to advance towards that ideal.

So, what is that City of God? The answer is unexpectedly complicated. The Bible often presents to us a binary choice: the Kingdom of Light versus the Kingdom of Darkness. If you are not with me, you are against me.

And at times, Augustine presents to us that simple binary. He writes:

In the earthly city, then, we find two features, one pointing to its own presence, the other serving by its presence to signify the heavenly city. What gives birth to citizens of the earthly city, however, is a nature vitiated by sin, and what gives birth to citizens of the heavenly city is grace liberating that nature from sin. Consequently, the former are called vessels of wrath (Rom 9:22) and the latter are called vessels of mercy (Rom 9:23). This is also signified in Abraham’s two sons. For one of them, Ishmael, was born of the slave named Hagar according to the flesh; and the other, Isaac, was born of Sarah, the free woman, according to the promise. Both sons, obviously enough, came from Abraham’s seed, but the one was begotten in the ordinary way, showing how nature works, while the other was given by the promise, signifying divine grace.

So we see here an argument founded on the Old Testament and the New Testament. The two vessels, vessels of wrath and mercy. The two sons, Ishmael and Isaac.

That seems simple enough but whatever you think the earthly city is, it is not the Kingdom of Darkness. In Augustine’s own words:

It would be wrong, however, to say that the things which this [earthly] city desires are not goods; for even this city, in its own human fashion, is better when it has them. For it desires a sort of earthly peace for the sake of the lowest goods, and it is that peace which it wants to achieve by waging war. For, if it triumphs and there is no one left to resist it, there will be peace, which the opposing parties did not have so long as they were fighting each other, in their wretched need, over things that they could not both possess at the same time. It is for this peace that grueling wars are fought, and it is this peace that supposedly glorious victory obtains.

When I come to this book, and any old book, I find myself constantly re-reading what I just read.

The earthly city is not a demonic, devilish city in cosmic opposition to the heavenly city. We just heard that it wants peace. Not an eternal peace, but a peace that all of us can understand.

The City of Man describes the world we eat, sleep, and wake up to. It is the messy world we navigate from home to work to school to battlefields. The City of Man represents a people who live together with those of the City of God, living together with different loves, different hates and, ultimately, different ends, one destined for eternal destruction, the other for eternal happiness.

And that is how the City of God ends. Part 2 began with Creation, and it moved from Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, to David, to Christ, then to Revelation. In the last three books, Books XX, XXI, and XXII, Augustine presents Judgment Day.

When someone says, “Eternal torment is impossible because the body would not be able to take it,” Augustine answers that salamanders can live in hot conditions, so the God who created the salamander would have no problem creating a human body to endure Hell in everlasting torment. If Augustine was writing today, he would probably use as an example the Pompeii worm that lives in undersea vents that go up to 100 degrees Celsius.

This is an under-appreciated benefit of reading the original works by great thinkers: we can get into their heads and follow their train of thought wherever it leads. Sure, A.I. can give us the answer we ask for, but we don’t know what interesting questions and answers there are until we follow the twists and turns of a great mind.

Translator’s Introduction and Notes

Before we end, I must say a few words about the translation. In the introduction to this book, the translator, William Babcock, gives a very good outline and summary of the whole book. And knowing that many readers would still be lost, he gives us a short summary at the beginning of each chapter to prepare readers for what is to come.

Babcock also gives us a peek behind the scenes by explaining why he made certain English choices for Augustine’s Latin words. For example, we don’t think much about the word happiness until we read how the translator is trying to find a word that captures the sense that Augustine is trying to convey. It is not fleeting happiness; it is a deep sense of fulfilment. And this is the deep, elusive happiness that Plato and Augustine try to define, and frankly, the happiness that all of us seek.

Extended Commentary on the Wheat and the Tares

In summary, I like Part 1. It’s judo for theologians. He uses the weight of the opponents against them. The fact that we do not have any worshippers of Mars, Venus and Apollos around us today is due to Augustine proving the worldview is untenable.

I was surprised by Part 2. But if I wanted to think about the Problem of Evil, or the various theological and scriptural topics he brings up, I would find a more recent book that would bring up Augustine’s ideas and compare them with what thinkers have considered since.

But reading Augustine’s words directly is helpful to understand how theology has developed over time. We connect to this great mind through his writings, and we understand why his approach and arguments are so influential through the Reformation and even today.

I would not read this book as a Christian’s political theory textbook. I wonder why I or anyone would ever think that. The City of God explains the way the world is, and where it is going. But Augustine would not see his work as the Christian’s answer to Plato’s Republic. He said so himself:

So long as this heavenly city is a pilgrim on earth, then, it calls forth citizens from all peoples and gathers together a pilgrim society of all languages. It cares nothing about any differences in the manners, laws, and institutions by which earthly peace is achieved or maintained.

The City of God is such a big book, and after I finished, I was thinking of a way to just make sense of everything I read.

And I thought that at the risk of over-simplification, Augustine’s City of God is an extended commentary on Jesus’
Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Wheat was sown in a field. At night, the enemy came and sowed weeds. The weeds or tares look like the wheat. The farmer told the workers, “Don’t pull the tares. We will sort it out in harvest time. In that time, we will bring the wheat into the barn, and throw the tares into the fire.”

In a nutshell, that is Augustine’s The City of God.

This is a Reading and Reader’s review of Augustine’s City of God. Hope you enjoyed it. The next book I review is also a great book I forced myself to read: John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by Robert White. Until next time, Bye bye.

Book List

The City of God by Saint Augustine. Translated by William Babcock. Amazon Vol I. Amazon Vol 2. Logos.