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.
Time and Change Began Together
Time, Augustine defines, is the measure of motion and change. Since God is absolutely unchangeable, time could not exist before a mutable creature was brought into being. Therefore, the world was created not in time but with time. The six days of Genesis are a logical and symbolic framework for understanding the ordering of creation. The “evening and morning” of the first three days, before the sun’s creation, must be understood non-literally, perhaps representing different states of angelic knowledge.
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