Augustine Begins The City of God after the Sack of Rome
When the Visigoth army of Alaric sacked Rome in August 410 CE, the shock to the ancient world was profound. Rome, the Eternal City, which had not been taken by a foreign enemy in eight centuries, lay open and pillaged. Pagans across the empire attributed the catastrophe to Christianity: Rome had abandoned its ancestral gods, they argued, and the gods had abandoned Rome. The charge was politically explosive and theologically urgent. Aurelius Augustinus, Bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa, began his response in 413 CE and continued it for thirteen years, completing The City of God Against the Pagans (De Civitate Dei contra Paganos) in 426 CE. It is the most important work of Christian political theology ever written, and it fundamentally shaped the intellectual framework of the European Middle Ages. Augustine's argument in the first ten books is polemical: he systematically demolishes the claim that Rome's traditional gods had ever protected the city, cataloguing the republic's civil wars, moral corruptions, and disasters predating Christianity. The pagan gods, he argues, were either demons or mere human projections; they had never guaranteed Rome's success, and their abandonment cannot explain its failure. But it is the second half of the work, the remaining twelve books, that constitutes Augustine's lasting positive achievement. He proposes a fundamental distinction between two cities that are not geographical entities but are defined by their orientation of love. The City of Man is built on self-love, on the desire for earthly glory, power, domination, and the gratification of mortal appetites. The City of God is built on love of God, on the orientation of will and desire toward the divine and eternal. The two cities are intermingled in history: every earthly state contains members of both, and neither the Church nor any political community maps neatly onto either city. This distinction had enormous political consequences. It de-sacralised the Roman Empire: Rome was not and never had been God's city on earth. No earthly political order was divine. This cut against imperial theology in the tradition of Eusebius of Caesarea, who had presented Constantine's Christian empire as the fulfilment of Providence. But it also cut against any simple withdrawal from politics: Christians lived in the earthly city and were obligated to seek its peace. Augustine's account of just war — inherited from Cicero but dramatically elaborated — became the foundation of all subsequent just war theory. War may be just only if waged by legitimate authority, for a just cause (defense against aggression or recovery of stolen property), and with right intention. The doctrine would structure debates about warfare through medieval canonists, Aquinas, Grotius, and into the present Geneva Conventions. His theology of original sin — that Adam's fall corrupted human nature, that all humans are born carrying this corruption, and that grace alone can redirect the will toward good — is among the most consequential and contested doctrines in Christian history. Its influence on Western understandings of human nature, political order, law, and psychology extends far beyond theology. Augustine died in 430 CE, as the Vandal army besieged Hippo. He had lived long enough to see the world his great work described.
- Year: 413 CE
- Category: Cultural
