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.
God created humanity upright, but through the abuse of free will, humanity corrupted itself and passed that corruption to all descendants. The whole human race existed in Adam seminally; when he fell, we fell. His voluntary departure from God preceded God’s abandonment of him—spiritual death came before the sentence of bodily death. When God asked “Where art thou?” He was not seeking information but calling Adam to recognize his condition: God was no longer with him. The sentence “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” pronounced the bodily death that would follow from spiritual death. Christians agree that bodily death is not natural but penal—the righteous judgment of God on sin.
Augustine now confronts the philosophers, particularly the Platonists, who ridicule the Christian teaching that death is punishment. These thinkers hold that the soul’s blessedness is complete only when it escapes the body entirely. Augustine responds that the burden is not the body itself but the body’s corruptibility. Scripture states that “the corruptible body presses down the soul”—the adjective is essential. The soul is weighed down not by embodiment as such but by the corrupted body that sin has produced.
More devastatingly, Augustine cites Plato himself against the Platonists. In the Timaeus, Plato represents the supreme Deity promising the lesser gods that they will never be separated from their bodies but will abide in them eternally. If embodiment were inherently miserable, why would the supreme God promise eternal union with the body as a gift? The philosophers contradict themselves: they maintain that souls must escape all bodies to be blessed, yet they affirm that the gods—whom they consider most blessed—are eternally united to their bodies. They cannot have it both ways.
The philosophers further object that earthly bodies cannot become incorruptible or inhabit heaven. Augustine replies that their own system undermines this objection. They consider the earth eternal, though it is the central member of their divine world-animal. If the earth can be eternal, why cannot earthly bodies be made eternal by God’s power? Plato himself acknowledges that God can prevent created things from dying and composite things from dissolving. What prevents God from conferring the same immortality on human bodies that Plato’s supreme Deity confers on the gods?
The objection from weight—that earthly bodies must fall to earth—proves equally weak. Human artistry can make vessels float from metals that sink. Cannot God, by means unknown to us, enable glorified bodies to transcend their natural weight? The soul already moves the body more easily when it is healthy than when it is sick; how much more perfectly will a glorified soul move a spiritual body? If angels can transport earthly creatures wherever they wish, surely the saints in their resurrection bodies will move with perfect freedom.
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