In the years following the sack of Rome in 410 AD, Augustine of Hippo wrote out an extensive apologetic work on the Christian faith. Apart from his Confessions, The City of God is probably the best-known of Augustine’s many compositions. The entire work is roughly divided into two parts. In the first Augustine offers refutations of polytheists and Platonists, and in the second he sketches, using a loosely historical framework, the Christian doctrines specifically touching on the “origin, history, and deserved ends” (X.32) of what he calls throughout the “two cities” – the saved and the unsaved.
Augustine’s “City of God” – contrasted with the “earthly city” – is sometimes assumed to represent an early stage in the development of the “Two Kingdoms”, sacred and secular, of later, especially Protestant, theology. However, Augustine’s concerns throughout are spiritual even where he touches on day-to-day life. If he had any unique theories on government, they do not, that I can tell, show in this work. If The City of God is an ancestor of any more recent view, it would seem most easily connected to those Christians who have taught against Christians holding public office, as being “of this world” – though I see nothing to indicate Augustine himself held this view.
In fact, Augustine’s world was largely Christian or at least Christianized. The Roman empire had at this point been tolerant in policy for a century and officially Christian for thirty years. However, earlier religious practice still clearly had some hold. In the opening books Augustine challenges a claim that the sack of Rome was due to the people abandoning the Roman gods for the Christian faith. This was evidently a claim he felt he had to take seriously, though I suspect any popular adherence was largely emotional and reactionary in the face of the disaster at Rome. It certainly fades as a concern in the later books – the whole thing was composed over some five or six years – and I think not just due to the structure of the work.
This is not a devotional work, though some of the meditations – it would be inaccurate to call them all arguments – especially in the second part could be so used with benefit. The intended audience is the unbelievers. However, it does not exactly have the characteristics we might expect today of an evangelical work. Augustine assumes the Christian gospel to be well known: I am not sure he spells it out explicitly even once. He also repeatedly claims that the nature and practices of Christian worship are well-known enough to not be worth bothering to describe explicitly.
A few impressions on that score do stand out. The first is that Augustine’s descriptions of the sacraments – the Lord’s Supper and baptism – are much closer to modern Roman Catholic practice than to evangelical understanding. He repeatedly refers to the Supper as a “sacrifice”, and no plausible translation bias (the translation I read was by Marcus Dods, a Scottish minister) could be alleged to explain this away. From everything I know, the Latin terminology would be in any case only possible to mis-translate intentionally. Similarly, Augustine seems to associate much more power with the act of baptism than most Protestants attest.
On the other hand, he does not seem to have any other acts in mind as occupying the same category – I don’t in fact remember that he refers to “sacraments at all” – and barely seems aware of any special clerical status. Of course, this may be due to his own experiences and the intended audience: especially in the first part of the book, he seems to be writing primarily to other philosophers as a peer.
One further note on practice: Augustine did believe in continuing miracles, and in fact documents many, including those associated with relics of the saints. However, while in many of the cases he cites, those seeking healing prayed at the relics, in no example does he admit of prayer offered except to God. The idea of praying to a saint for the saint’s intercession is missing, at least from Augustine’s apologetic, or in fact reversed. Augustine professes himself agnostic as to whether God acts directly or the saint may have been delegated the power to act – which would imply praying to God to let the saint act. He admits it may even be possible that God will deem to save some at the Last Judgment due to intercession of the saints – but considers this a questionable interpretation, denies that even if possible such prayers could be directly sought or bought, and, in connection with this question, explicitly denies any doctrine of Purgatory.
Certainly, though, we can see here early traces of practices that would lead to directing prayers directly to saints, particularly in the practice he recounts – slightly embarrassed, and attributing it to the less well-instructed only – of leaving an offering by such relics or spots thought to be holy. Also, if prayers to saints had been common he would certainly have had to make some justification for them in his remarks against the Platonists. Here he argues at length against the efficacy of prayer to any beings (with an amazing variety of distinctions) less than God. Given the detail of his refutations, it is hardly plausible he would leave such a vulnerable point of rebuttal unexamined, had circumstances actually suggested it.
Moving on to those things Augustine does discuss in detail, his work has several characteristics, some of which have been passed down to future Christian writing. He is fascinated by possible spiritual implications of numbers. He has a bad habit of deriving arguments from a single word or phrase without context – sometimes in defiance of context. He is inclined to present the Old Testament patriarchs as virtually perfect, explaining away, ignoring, or minimizing even their wilder misdeeds.
He admits and discusses the fact that the Egyptian chronology doesn’t seem to fit with the Biblical – or anybody else’s for that matter, although he refers to several documents or studies that as far as I can tell are either now lost or interpreted substantially differently. He comes up with several ingenious possibilities, of various plausibility, for aligning the dates although he doesn’t really seem happy with any of them.
On the other end of things, as far as I can make out, Augustine here holds to an amillennial interpretation of Revelation and other writings that refer to the Last Judgment, although he admits to having changed his mind. He argues that the “first resurrection” should be understood merely as salvation, and the “millennium” is merely symbolic for the age of the church’s work.
Finally, I want to touch on an element of Augustine’s views which have often been lost in the church: I mean his humane ethics. He argues, for instance, in defiance of both pagan views and what has often carried over to the Church, that a woman who is raped is not guilty: only a willing action is sinful. Taking the Roman legend of Lucretia, who committed suicide after being raped, and thus was held up as an icon of purity, he points out the problem with that veneration like this: if she was correct in thinking she deserved punishment and so taking her own life, it must have been because she knew she actually consented to an act of adultery; but if she did not consent, she was innocent and so should not have committed suicide.
He similarly writes against suicide to avoid rape – substituting a worse act for mere bodily embarrassment – but the unpopularity of this view within even the Church is shown by the fact that in the most famous cases, where such women had become regarded as martyrs, he admits they might be justified if following divine instruction. Life, even one’s own life, is after all on the Christian view in the hand of God to preserve or dispose – but Augustine is clearly himself inclined to doubt that possibility’s plausibility. What is startling and to the modern reader can even obscure the humanity of his conclusion is the unfamiliar brutality of his arguments.
He argues in similar form against any type of racism – beginning with the extremes. He claims even the wilder mythological or legendary figures, with “feet turned backwards from the heel” or “no head, but eyes in their shoulders” or even “dog-like head and barking [taken for] beasts” should be regarded, if real, as men, “no matter what unusual appearance he presents in colour, movement, sound… power, part, or quality…” Augustine then works backward to defend on the same principle the common humanity of those with more ordinary deformities: “more than four fingers… only two fingers… persons of doubtful sex…” and so on to conjoined twins and other oddities: “…[W]e [ought] not suppose [these]… are failures of that wisdom whereby He fashions the human nature…”
Romance of Victory 