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.
Among Socrates’ disciples, Plato surpassed all the rest in brilliance and fame. Born of honorable Athenian parents and endowed with remarkable natural gifts, he traveled widely to master every branch of knowledge. He studied in Egypt and then journeyed to Italy, where he absorbed the Pythagorean tradition. Though he honored Socrates by making him the principal speaker in his dialogues, Plato combined the moral emphasis of his master with the contemplative depth of Pythagoras. He is therefore credited with perfecting philosophy by uniting its active and contemplative dimensions. Plato divided philosophy into three parts: the moral, which concerns action and the regulation of life; the natural, which investigates the causes of things; and the rational, which distinguishes truth from falsehood. Those who have best understood Plato recognize that in God are found the cause of existence, the light of understanding, and the end toward which all life should be directed.
If Plato thus defined the wise person as one who knows, imitates, and loves God, and who attains blessedness through fellowship with Him, there is no need to dispute with other philosophical schools. The Platonists come nearer to Christian truth than any others. The fabulous theology must yield to them—that theatrical display of divine crimes—and the civil theology must yield as well, with its impure demons seducing nations under the name of gods. Varro’s interpretations of sacred rites as referring to heaven and earth, to seeds and perishable operations, must give way. The writings Numa caused to be buried with himself, and the letter revealing that the principal gods were once mortal men—these too must yield. The materialist philosophers who made bodies the principles of all things—Thales with his water, Anaximenes with his air, the Stoics with their fire, Epicurus with his atoms—all must give place to those who recognized the true God as the author of all things, the source of truth’s light, and the giver of blessedness. For these materialists, with minds enslaved to bodily sense, failed to perceive what lay within themselves: they could represent inwardly what they had seen outwardly, yet that mental representation is not itself a body but the likeness of one. The faculty that beholds and judges this likeness is neither body nor bodily image. If the rational soul is not a body, how can God its Creator be a body?
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