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 then shifts to a survey of Roman history to demonstrate that the Republic was ruined by vice long before the advent of Christ. He begins by noting that if the gods had truly possessed a regard for righteousness, the Romans should have received good laws from them. Instead, Rome had to borrow laws from Solon of Athens, and even the laws of Numa Pompilius were insufficient and not divinely originated. The gods provided no legislative framework for justice; the Romans had to look to human wisdom. He challenges the notion that “equity and virtue prevailed by nature” in early Rome by citing the rape of the Sabine women—an act of violence and treachery that was commemorated in the games. He argues that there was no equity in carrying off by force girls who were strangers and guests, decoyed by a pretense of a spectacle. If the Sabines were wrong to deny their daughters, was it not a greater wrong in the Romans to steal them? He also cites the injustice done to Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, a good man forced into exile solely because of his name, and the ingratitude shown to Marcus Camillus, the savior of Rome, who was driven into exile by the envy of the tribunes and fined despite his unparalleled service. These early iniquities, far from being anomalies, were symptoms of a deeper moral sickness.
To further prove the moral corruption of the Republic, Augustine invokes the testimony of Sallust, whose own words in praise of the Romans (“equity and virtue prevailed among them not more by force of laws than of nature”) are turned against them. Sallust acknowledges that even in the brief period after the expulsion of the kings, fear of external war (the Tuscan war and Tarquin’s vengeance) was the cause of the interval of equity and good order. But after that, the patricians treated the people as slaves, and the people, oppressed by usury and forced into constant wars, eventually took arms and seceded. Sallust then laments that after the destruction of Carthage, discord, avarice, ambition, and other vices increased more than ever, sweeping away the primitive manners like a torrent. The youth became so depraved by luxury that no father had a son who could preserve his patrimony or keep his hands off other men’s property. Augustine stresses that these things happened not only before Christ taught, but before He was even born of the Virgin. He asks why the gods are not blamed for these evils, which they instilled into the minds of men through their corrupting worship, while every present affliction is furiously imputed to Christ, who teaches life-giving truth and forbids the worship of false gods.
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