The City of God stands as Augustine's masterwork of theological defense and construction, written over thirteen years in response to accusations that Christianity brought ruin upon Rome. This first volume contains the first ten books of sustained refutation—demolishing pagan claims that traditional worship secured either temporal prosperity or eternal happiness—followed by the beginning of his positive vision in Books Eleven through Thirteen, where he traces the origin of two societal orders to the primordial division among the angels. What emerges is not merely an apology for Christianity but a philosophy of history that subordinate the fate of empires to the hidden providence of the one true God, whose sovereignty extends from creation through the fall to the final judgment.
Augustine concludes that one should not look for an efficient cause of the evil will, for it is a deficient cause, not an efficient one. Defection from the supreme being to a lesser being is the beginning of an evil will. Seeking the cause of such defection is like trying to see darkness or hear silence; these are known not by their presence but by their absence. The will becomes evil by turning away from the immutable good to mutable goods. The fault lies not in the object loved—for gold, beauty, or power are not evil—but in the inordinate love of the creature that neglects the higher good for a lower one. He who inordinately loves a lower good becomes evil in the midst of that good and wretched because he is deprived of the greater good.
In contrast to the evil will, Augustine considers the good will of the holy angels. He argues that if there were no efficient cause of the good will, one might erroneously suppose the good will to be co-eternal with God. But since the angels are created, their good will must also be created. They could not have existed for a time without a good will, for then they would have been evil or at least not good. Nor could they have produced a good will in themselves without God’s help, for that would imply they made themselves better than God made them. Therefore, the holy angels never existed without a good will or the love of God. They were created with a holy love that enabled them to cleave to Him. The love of God is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit. Those who have this good in common form one City of God, a holy fellowship with Him and with one another.
Augustine then turns to the creation of man, refuting pagan theories that the human race is eternal or that the world has existed for countless ages. He dismisses the chronologies of Apuleius and others who claim vast cycles of destruction and renewal, noting that these contradict the authority of Scripture, which records less than six thousand years of history. He cites the discrepancies between Egyptian and Greek chronologies to show the unreliability of such claims. Augustine also addresses the opinion that there are numberless worlds or that the same world perpetually dies and is renewed in cycles. He argues that these theories are attempts to solve the problem of why man was created so recently, but they fail.
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