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.
Infinite Space and Time Before Creation
Augustine addresses the speculative question: why did God create a world when He did, and not sooner? He retorts that the same vanity appears if one asks why He placed it where it is and not elsewhere. To imagine infinite time before creation is as meaningless as imagining infinite space outside the world. God is the Lord of time and space, not their subject. The creation was an act of His free, eternal will, not a response to external necessity.
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