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 reinforces this argument with the testimony of Cicero, who stated that the Republic had utterly ceased to exist before Christ came. He recounts Cicero’s definition that a republic is the “weal of the people,” and that a people is an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of law and a community of interests. Cicero argues that where justice has become extinct, a republic altogether ceases to be; it is no longer the people’s weal when a tyrant lords it over the state. In the dialogue, Scipio maintains that a republic can exist only under a just monarch, a just aristocracy, or a just people; any other form is a mere counterfeit. Cicero confesses that the Roman republic had long since lost the reality, retaining only the name, and that this loss was due to the vices of the citizens, not to any mishap. He laments that the primitive morality had become so obsolete that men no longer even knew it, and that the poverty of great men was a crime for which they must answer. Augustine argues that true justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ—the City of God. The Roman republic, even at its best, was a colored painting, not the living reality of justice.
Augustine identifies the pagan gods not as benevolent powers but as demons who actively incited men to wickedness. He argues that these demons did not merely neglect to correct the morals of the Romans but accelerated their destruction by increasing demoralization. He points to the civil wars that plagued Rome, noting that the demons were seen rehearsing battles in a wide plain in Campania shortly before a great and bloody conflict occurred there. Augustine interprets this as a demonic attempt to justify civil wars by showing that the gods themselves fought with one another, thereby lending a quasi-divine authority to human crimes and disguising the bitterness of fratricidal slaughter. The demons sought to make men think that if the gods quarrel, then human strife is permissible; indeed, it is a form of worship.
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