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.
The learned among the pagans understood this difficulty well. Augustine invokes the pontiff Scaevola, who frankly acknowledged that the gods could be classified in three ways: the poetic, the philosophical, and the civic. The poetic divinities, with their scandalous myths, were unworthy of belief; the philosophical conceptions, while nearer the truth, were unfit for popular consumption because they denied the divinity of figures like Hercules and Aesculapius and taught that the supreme being possesses no bodily form. The civic gods, therefore, were retained by the state for reasons of political expediency, even though the ruling class recognized their falsity. Scaevola’s candor lays bare the cynicism at the heart of Roman religion: the educated elite deliberately perpetuated falsehood because they judged it useful for maintaining social order. Augustine condemns this calculation as a devilish mimicry of the demons themselves, who enslave both the deceivers and the deceived in a common web of illusion. A religion that admits its own mendacity cannot be the vehicle of genuine human flourishing.
Before reaching his conclusion, Augustine addresses the famous augury associated with the founding of the Capitoline temple. When King Tarquin consulted the auspices to determine whether the resident deities would yield their places to Jupiter, Mars, Terminus, and Juventas all refused. The priests interpreted this refusal as a pledge that the Roman people, their frontiers, and their youth would never submit to any foreign power. History, however, tells a different story. The Gauls sacked Rome and humiliated its citizens on their own soil, demonstrating that the nation dedicated to Mars could indeed be crushed. Hannibal pushed the republic’s borders back to a perilously narrow perimeter, belying the promise associated with Terminus. Centuries later the emperor Hadrian voluntarily surrendered three eastern provinces to the Persian Empire, and the emperor Julian’s rash campaign compelled a still further contraction of the frontier. The augury, so celebrated in the annals, proved empty: the deities in question could not protect what they had vowed to defend.
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