The City of God: Books 1-10

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A fascinating view of a world transitioning from paganism to Christianity.

I've been wanting to read Augustine's The City of God for forty years. Somehow, though, I would plow into the first few pages and not find what I expected. Instead, I found a long discussions on Roman history, nothing of the keen observations on theology and philosophy that I expected. Then, The Great Courses put out a lecture series on the book and my Communio group agreed to read the entire book in conjunction with listening to the course.

With that inducement, I attacked the book again and this time I found it captivating. I still found the first several books to be a bit of slog. The first several books essentially involve a dated argument in response to pagans who argued that the sacking of Rome by Alaric and his Visigoths in 410 AD proved the baneful influence of Christianity, which had ended sacrifices to the traditional Roman gods some decades before. Augustine's response is to point out that the Visigoths spared the lives of those who took refuge in Christian churches, but he does not mention that these barbarians were, in fact, Christians. He also points out the long history of Roman disasters where Roman gods had done nothing to protect Rome.

Augustine comes across as very anti-Roman in these sections. It's actually rather surprising since one would assume that Augustine's anti-patriotic rant would rub other Romans the wrong way. It may be the case that the Roman ideal was actually breaking down, and, certainly, Augustine would end his life during the Vandal siege of Carthage, which resulted in the detachment of north Africa from Roman control until the seventh century.

The first several books are interesting as history. Augustine offers an extensive review of Roman history. We also get a view of the life of the Roman of the time, particularly what they believed and valued. For example, Augustine spends a lot of time railing at Roman theater and actors, and, particularly, the depiction of Roman gods in those plays. While we might think that Augustine was merely a blue-nose, the Great Course lecture series describes those plays as literal “snuff” and pornography.

I was pleased to run across Augustine's aphorism about “Justice being absent what are empires but great robber bands.” This comes in an interesting discussion of what it means to be a republic. In this day and age, it would be a good thing to reflect on his discussion of Cicero's definition of “republic”:

“Once this point was treated satisfactorily, Scipio returns to the interrupted theme and recalls and recommends his own brief definition of a republic which, he had said, is the common good of a people.[67] He stipulates, however, that a people is not just any assembly of a multitude but rather an assembly joined together by a common sense for what is right and a community of interest. He then explains the great advantage of definition in debate, and he goes on to conclude from these definitions of his that a republic — that is, the common good of a people — only exists when it is well and justly governed, whether by a single king or by a few of the most prominent men or by the people as a whole.[68] But when the king is unjust (in this case, following the Greeks, he called the king a tyrant), or the most prominent men are unjust (he termed the consensus of such men a faction), or the people itself is unjust (for this case he found no term in common use, although he might also have called the people itself a tyrant), the republic is not simply flawed, as had been argued the day before. Rather, as logical deduction from his definitions would show, it does not exist at all. For there is no common good of a people when a tyrant or a faction has taken it over, nor is the people itself any longer a people if it is unjust, since it is no longer a multitude joined together by a common sense for what is right and a community of interest — which was the very definition of a people. Thus, when the Roman republic was in the sorry state Sallust described, it was not simply “the worst and most depraved,” as he claimed. In fact, according to the reasoning set out in this discussion of the republic by its great leaders of the time, it did not exist at all.”

An interesting thing I learned was that a feature I disliked about the book was essential to it. At times it seems that Augustine would veer on a tangent and engage in an extended discussion that had nothing to do with the subject. In fact, this was happening; the literary style of the time encouraged the “excursus,” the long tangent. So, what I thought was a tangent was, in fact, a tangent, which was nice to know.

After Book 5, Augustine begins to tack the Roman gods and Roman philosophers. He is of the opinion that Roman gods were demons, but which he means rational incorporeal powers who inhabit the air and are subjected to passions, that being the traditional definition offered by Roman philosophy. Augustine drags the three approaches to the Roman gods - the Civic, the philosophical (or Natural), and the popular through the glass by pointing out the immoral conduct that all three approaches depict as natural to the gods.

Augustine then turns to the philosophers. It is here that we can see Augustine's deep knowledge of Plato, Plotinus and Porphyry. Augustine opines that the Platonists are the premier philosophy because they are closest to Christianity in their understanding of a supreme God as one, but they lack an idea of the Trinity and abhor the idea that the supreme and unapproachable God would sully itself by trafficking with a human body.

Augustine savagely attacks Platonistic limitations on all fronts. This is actually a strong introduction to Neoplatonism. For example, Augustine points out that the Neoplatonists affirmed the reincarnation, which he considers inconsistent with their abhorrence for bodies, inasmuch as souls flee from bodies to seek immortality, but then when purged of memory by the waters of Lethe, those immortal souls seek new bodies.

Augustine offers an extended discussion of demons. Augustine's world was filled with demons. The gods were demons. Divination was used by demons to control human beings. Platonists might claim that people with knowledge of theurgy were communicating with angels, but they were really communicating with demons.

The final several books offer insights into Platonism, Christian theology and Roman popular beliefs. I found these books to be particularly interesting. These books offer a window into a world that was transitioning between paganism and Christianity. After forty years, it was worth the read.