Augustine of Hippo · Theology
When Rome fell in 410, the world seemed to end. Augustine answered with <em>The City of God</em> - a vast reframing of all history as the intertwined story of two cities, built by two loves, that will not be separated until the end of time.
In 410, the unthinkable happened: the Visigoths sacked Rome, the Eternal City, untouched by a foreign enemy for eight centuries. Across the Empire, pagans pointed a furious finger at the Christians: Rome had abandoned its old gods for Christ, and look - the gods had abandoned Rome in return. Augustine, now an old bishop in North Africa, took up the challenge and spent thirteen years answering it. The result, The City of God, is one of the most ambitious books ever written: a reinterpretation of the entire span of human history, designed to show that no earthly city - not even Rome - was ever the true home of humanity, and that its fall, however terrible, was not the catastrophe it seemed.
The engine of the whole book is that single formula: two loves have made two cities. Augustine is extending the ‘order of loves’ from the individual soul to the whole of history. A society, like a person, is constituted by what it loves above all. The earthly city organises itself around self-glory, domination, and the goods of this world; it can achieve real things - order, law, even a kind of peace - but its foundation is pride, the will to put the self at the centre. The heavenly city is the company of those whose hearts are finally turned toward God. Crucially, the two are not neatly Christian-versus-pagan or Church-versus-empire: there are members of the earthly city inside the visible Church, and citizens of the City of God scattered among the nations, known fully only to God.
The members of the City of God, Augustine says, live in this world as pilgrims or resident aliens - they make use of earthly peace, obey just laws, and even serve the common good, but their true citizenship lies elsewhere. They do not despise the earthly peace; they need it and work for it. But they hold it lightly, knowing it is provisional. This image gave Christianity a way to be deeply engaged in the world without being captured by it - neither fleeing society like a hermit nor worshipping the state like a zealot. The two cities are intermingled now, sharing the same streets, ‘until the Last Judgement effects their separation.’ History is the long, ambiguous time in which they grow up together, like wheat and weeds in one field.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Augustine read all of history as two cities built by two loves. Reconstruct the distinction, and explain what it implies about politics and the state, in your own words.
Leads to Niccolo Machiavelli.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.