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.
This observation opens a still more damaging line of reasoning. If divine patrons truly determined the fortunes of nations, then the gods who sustained Assyria for so many centuries must have either perished when the empire fell, transferred their services to the rival Medes and Persians in pursuit of better terms, or proved too weak to defend their clients against human adversaries. Each alternative is equally damning: the first makes the gods mortal, the second reduces them to mercenaries, and the third denies them omnipotence. Augustine notes the irony that when these ancient kingdoms collapsed, the name of Christ was wholly unknown in those regions; had the Christian faith already been preached, the pagans of Assyria would no doubt have leveled the same accusation that Augustine’s contemporaries now voice—namely, that abandoning the old rites brought about the loss of national greatness. The parallel strips the present-day complaint of any novelty or force.
With the historical argument secured, Augustine turns to a systematic demolition of the Roman pantheon, beginning with its most conspicuous weakness: the absurdly narrow scope of its minor deities. Roman piety had fractured divine responsibility into a bewildering array of specialized powers, each entrusted with a single, often trivial, function. One spirit watched over sown grain while it lay beneath the soil; a second took charge of the growing stalk; a third guarded the harvested grain in the granary. Still others presided over the knots on the stem, the opening of the sheath, the flowering of the ear, and the ripening of the kernel. Doors, hinges, and thresholds each received their own separate guardian. The cares of infancy were distributed among powers overseeing the birth-cry, the cradle, suckling, and the child’s first steps. Augustine argues that beings so confined to minute, isolated tasks could not possibly exercise the comprehensive vision required to found, expand, or safeguard a vast imperial state. A deity restricted to watching cradles cannot be expected to deliberate on matters of war and diplomacy, just as a spirit confined to the doorpost cannot manage the threshold and hinge simultaneously.
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