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 Platonists perceived that no material body can be God, and so they transcended all bodies in their search. They perceived that whatever is changeable cannot be the most high God, and so they transcended every soul and all mutable spirits. They understood that in every changeable thing, the form that makes it what it is can exist only through Him who truly is, since He alone is unchangeable. Whether we consider the whole fabric of the world with its orderly motion, or all bodies contained within it, or every kind of life—from the nutritive life of plants to the sensitive life of beasts to the rational life of humans to the angelic life that needs no sustenance—all exist only through Him who absolutely is. In Him, to be, to live, to understand, and to be blessed are one and the same. From this unchangeableness and simplicity, the Platonists gathered that all things were made by Him and that He Himself was made by none.
In rational philosophy the Platonists likewise excel. Augustine refuses to compare them with those who assigned to bodily senses the power of discriminating truth—the Epicureans and Stoics who derived their notions from sense perception. The Platonists distinguished what the mind conceives from what the senses perceive, and they affirmed that the light by which we understand all things is God Himself, by whom all things were made.
In moral philosophy they hold the first rank as well. The question concerns the chief good—that final end beyond which nothing further need be sought. Let all yield to those who taught that the human being is blessed not through enjoyment of body or mind, but through enjoyment of God. Plato defined the final good as life according to virtue, and taught that only those who know and imitate God can attain virtue. He therefore held that to philosophize is to love God, whose nature is incorporeal. The philosopher becomes blessed when he begins to enjoy God, for though loving what ought not to be loved brings misery, no one is blessed who does not enjoy what he loves.
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