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 opens his monumental apology with a preface addressed to Marcellinus, the friend who prompted the work and to whom it is dedicated. He announces his intention to defend the City of God against those who prefer their own deities to its Founder. This city, he explains, exists in two states: it sojourns as a pilgrim in time, living by faith among the ungodly, and it awaits its eternal dwelling in the stability of its heavenly seat. The task is arduous, for it requires persuading the proud of the virtue of humility—a virtue that exalts not through human arrogance but through divine grace. The King of this city has declared that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble, a prerogative that earthly rulers mimic when they show pity to the humbled while crushing the proud, though they do so from ambition rather than love. Augustine must therefore speak of the earthly city as well, that city which, though mistress of nations, is itself ruled by its lust for dominion.
The immediate occasion for this defense is the sack of Rome by the Goths, a catastrophe that pagan critics have blamed on the Christian prohibition of their worship. Augustine begins his rebuttal by observing the conduct of the barbarians and the ingratitude of those who survived. Many pagans who escaped the slaughter did so by fleeing to Christian churches, yet now they blaspheme the very name that preserved them. The reliquaries of the martyrs and the basilicas of the apostles became sanctuaries for all who sought refuge, whether Christian or pagan. There the enemy’s fury was restrained; there the bloodthirsty soldiers showed mercy, sparing those they might otherwise have slaughtered and even leading captives to freedom. These survivors owe their lives to the respect the barbarians held for Christ, yet they attribute their preservation to fortune rather than to divine providence. They ought rather to recognize that the calamities they suffered were a divine chastisement for their sins, while the mercy they received was the fruit of Christian influence.
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