The City of God

"I hesitated over The City of God , but not because it’s not unbelievably important. If one were to point to a single work of Augustine that has been the most influential, I think it would probably be the City of God rather than the Confessions . The City of God has so many of Augustine’s ideas that are so influential, whether you’re talking about the exposition of just war theory, for example, or the rereading of human history in an eschatological framework. You don’t often see it described this way but you have the rereading of the Hebrew scriptures in a way that is so integrated with that eschatological framework. At the same time, I hesitated over choosing The City of God because it is almost too capacious and so digressive. In the end, I thought, yes, I will put it on the list anyway because it seems to me perfectly legitimate to read it in sections. It excerpts very well. It can be read in this massive arc. There’s no doubt that Augustine hoped that at least some people would read it that way, because he, unusually for him, includes a lot of internal pointers as to how one section looks back to another or how the whole should hang together. I partly picked it for its capaciousness —for its significance in so many intellectual traditions. So much of what we know about Augustine, like it or not, goes back to the City of God . I find the sheer ambition of it magnificent. It is absolutely extraordinary that he undertakes this project, to tell the history of the Romans, from the foundation of Rome, back to a Roman audience. And let’s not forget, he is North African. Better still, he was educated in Carthage, the proverbial enemy of Rome. But he starts by telling Roman history back to the Romans in a completely counterintuitive way. And then he tells Christian history to the Christians in the latter twelve books, in this incredibly ambitious, overarching, visionary way, bringing it right up to the present. “If one were to point to a single work of Augustine that has been the most influential, I think it would probably be the City of God ” To think that this complicated historical project, which is so magnificent, should have been prompted by the fall of Rome in 410 CE is again the most extraordinary thought. He seems to have started writing it two or three years later. We have earlier works of his, including some sermons, that respond more immediately to the fall of Rome. And so, we can see his thought processes on this one. We can see him beginning to work out what it means to defend a Christian dispensation, and a Christian interpretation of history, which of course, is part of what he’s doing. But we can also see him thinking through what it means to be a civitas Dei . We translate that phrase as ‘city of God’ and civitas does mean ‘city’ in late antiquity. But what it means in origin is a group of citizens. It’s the abstract noun formed from the word for citizen. So it’s the essence of citizenness, if you like. We can actually see that part of Augustine’s preparatory thought for the City of God is thinking, well, what does it mean to be a civitas ? What does it mean to be a civitas Dei , a group of citizens belonging to God? And what does it mean to be a group of citizens or community on earth, a civitas terrena ? These are the two fundamental, but not mutually exclusive, divisions to the work. I think that’s a really important way of formulating it. It’s about the questions that the fall of Rome provokes on both the spiritual level and an earthly level. You have the pragmatic level about how to meet objections, as well as the theological level. I find it hard to go with the notion that it’s a response to Plato’s Republic , for the very simple reason that I’m one of the people who thinks that Augustine’s Greek just isn’t good enough to take the Republic on board, though there were translated bits of it around. Much more important is the fact that it is undoubtedly a response to Cicero’s De Republica . That’s quite explicit, particularly in book nineteen of the City of God which is my favourite book. But with Augustine, I don’t think he has one single mode of approach. Yes, that’s an excellent point. But of course, they are a different sort of Christian—they are Arians, and don’t believe in the fully divine nature of Christ or, therefore, the Trinitarian God of Christian orthodoxy. I don’t think Augustine necessarily takes on much directly about how this impacted the sack of Rome in 410, except inasmuch as he depicts these invaders behaving unusually courteously for invaders, describing them in Book 1 escorting people to asylum in churches, and so on and so forth. The point seems to be—okay, they’re sacking Rome, but as Christians they’re sacking it very decently. Now I don’t think this is the most clear-headed bit of the City of God . And then he leaves it behind as a theme. The first three books of the City of God are qualitatively very different from the rest. I would say that their tenor is one of anger and of urgency. They read as if he wanted to get some sort of response out fast. Then he draws back, and he hits his stride. I think it’s only at that point that the much larger arc of the work becomes apparent to him, that this is not just a polemical response. Whenever I read or teach the beginning of the City of God , it feels like someone in an argument taking someone else by the lapels, and just shouting at them. And that’s not the tenor of the work as a whole at all. It becomes much more confident and measured as the work goes on. Not only did the Vandals espouse a recognised, albeit heterodox, form of Christianity (Arianism again), but there’s been really interesting work done lately on the ways in which Vandal culture perpetuated Roman culture in North Africa. Vandal culture is not an oxymoron. They really left a great deal untouched from the best of the Roman traditions, including aspects of the education system. Things did not instantly collapse and corrode. There was a lot of continuity and indeed, bizarrely, generations later, there was still attention to Romanness as a touchstone for culture. Again, because of my particular focus of interest, the one that jumps out as unmissable is the one that Hannah Arendt took as a touchstone for The Human Condition , City of God 12.21: “in order to make a beginning, man was created.” The reason I’m hesitating a bit about the translation ‘man’ is he uses the gender nonspecific homo , not vir . The details of how Augustine reads that specific part of Genesis are just so fertile. I admire Arendt’s Human Condition hugely. So, that seems incredibly important. In total contrast, there are really playful bits of Augustine too. He teases and he tweaks and he jokes, particularly in the earlier books. I particularly like the bit where he talks about the whole grand myth on which Virgil’s Aeneid is based, of the gods of Troy—who of course have been taken from Troy to found the new Rome—getting dissatisfied and wanting to move on. Augustine takes these absolutely sacred (in the pre-Christian sense) points of Roman self-mythologisation and he just tweaks them. I love those little passages. I think Augustine would have been an amazing person just to sit and talk with. I think the humour and the quickness of mind that is a little frozen in his texts would have been such fun to encounter. But he would also have been terrifying; he would have been so intense."

"Augustine’s City of God created the distinction between the ‘City of God,’ which is perfect, and the earthly city, where we live day-to-day. Augustine seems to envision the ‘City of God’ as something that would be given material manifestation after the Last Judgment. People who have tried to form utopias have always tried to reconcile the ‘City of God’ with the city of men. Since humans are fallen, by nature, no earthly utopia will ever approach the perfection of the ‘City of God.’ Oneida’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, had a classical education at Dartmouth. As an undergraduate he trained in law; then he got his divinity license from Yale Theological Seminary. So he would’ve been versed in biblical scholarship, including Augustine. “Utopian projects usually end disastrously.” Noyes does not refer to Augustine in his writing, but I’m sure that City of God was part of his basis for the distinction he made between what he called the visible world of saints from the invisible world of saints. For him, the invisible world was a heavenly association of angels that would join with the earth when the Last Judgment came. It seems likely that City of God was part of his background given that Noyes also envisions two distinct cities that will merge one day."