Work record

City of God

Augustine of Hippo

413–426 CE · Ancient · Philosophy · Latin

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Posthumous or imagined likeness of Augustine of Hippo. Source · Public domain

Summary

City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods. Augustine first answers Roman religion and civic pride. The pagan gods did not protect Rome from earlier disasters, and Roman virtue, though impressive, was directed by love of domination and glory. He then attacks myths, sacrifices, demons and philosophical accounts of happiness that cannot secure eternal peace. The second half constructs a sacred history from creation to final judgment. The earthly city is formed by love of self even to contempt of God; the city of God by love of God even to contempt of self. These cities are intermixed in time, not identical with any earthly institution, and will be separated only at the end. Augustine ranges across angels, evil, original sin, sexuality, death, biblical history, empire, resurrection and eternal punishment. The book is vast, digressive and often severe, but its controlling question is therapeutic and political: where should human beings place hope when states fall, bodies suffer and history looks chaotic? Medically, City of God matters through plague, rape, suicide, grief, bodily resurrection, disability, sexuality after the fall and the psychology of pride. Augustine argues against suicide even after sexual violation and insists that bodily suffering does not stain the soul. Many readers will find parts difficult, but the work remains a central text for trauma, theodicy and the distinction between political health and ultimate healing. Augustine’s answer is not withdrawal from history but reordered allegiance within it. Citizens still mourn, govern, suffer and seek peace, but they must not confuse any fragile commonwealth with final beatitude. That distinction made the book endlessly useful and widely debated.

Plot or Argument

Rome and the gods
Augustine argues that pagan gods neither protected Rome nor produced true virtue.
Critique of Roman glory
Roman courage and empire are reinterpreted through pride, domination and unstable earthly reward.
Demons and philosophy
Pagan worship, demons and philosophical schools are judged inadequate for salvation and happiness.
Two cities
Human history is organized by two loves: self-centered earthly love and love directed toward God.
Sacred history
Creation, fall, Israel, Christ and the church are narrated within providence.
Last things
Resurrection, judgment, eternal punishment and peace complete the contrast between cities.

Lessons

Political disaster is not ultimate meaning
Augustine refuses to let Rome’s fall define reality. He teaches a discipline of hope beyond state success or failure.
- Does this comfort or excuse political loss?
- What earthly goods does Augustine still value?
Related across the library
- Confessions, Lesson: The divided will
  The divided will. Augustine shows that knowing the good is not the same as wanting it wholeheartedly. His account of habit binding the will is one of the first detailed analyses of inner conflict.
- The Bible, Lesson: The problem of suffering
  The problem of suffering. Job refuses the comforters' claim that suffering is always punishment. The book honours protest and leaves the question of innocent suffering open.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Lesson: The self is a task, not a given
  The self is a task, not a given. Anti-Climacus defines the self as an activity of relating to oneself, a synthesis that can be held together well or badly. On this view selfhood is achieved rather than possessed, and despair is the failure to become the self one is. The idea underlies much existentialist and humanistic psychology.
- Confessions, Book IX.10–13
  Monica's fever and death at Ostia and Augustine's struggle to restrain his tears.
- Wuthering Heights, Medical lens
  Wuthering Heights is a major medical-lens novel: Catherine's delirious illness and childbirth death, Hindley's alcoholism, Linton's chronic invalidism, Heathcliff's obsessive grief and self-starvation, and repeated deathbed care make the body central. The novel is also rich for trauma and attachment studies, though retrospective diagnosis should be hedged. Illness often expresses social and emotional violence rather than functioning as neutral plot device.
Loves build cities
The book’s deepest sociology is affective: communities are ordered by what they love. Politics begins in desire.
- What does a society’s love reveal?
- Can mixed loves build just institutions?
Related across the library
- The Sickness Unto Death, Medical lens
  The Sickness Unto Death is framed throughout by medical analogy: Anti-Climacus writes like a physician at the bedside, insists that almost no one is wholly healthy, and distinguishes the sufferer's self-report from the expert's diagnosis. Its concept of despair is not depression, and the book explicitly separates despair from mere mood, yet its descriptions of hopelessness, the wish to die and the inability to die, and the self-consuming quality of despair are frequently cited in psychiatry, existential psychoth...
- Pensees, Lesson: Diversion as the flight from oneself
  Diversion as the flight from oneself. Pascal argues that people seek constant activity, from hunting to war, because being alone with their thoughts is unbearable. The analysis anticipates later accounts of boredom, avoidance and compulsive distraction, though Pascal's remedy is religious rather than therapeutic.
- Alone in Berlin, Lesson: The persecutor is also a prisoner
  The persecutor is also a prisoner. Escherich begins as a confident professional and ends in despair. The novel suggests that serving cruelty destroys the servant.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Lesson: Responsible action means accepting guilt
  Responsible action means accepting guilt. 'After Ten Years' argues that people of conscience who keep their hands clean may still fail their neighbours. Bonhoeffer's decision to join a conspiracy to kill Hitler embodies an ethics that acts and bears the guilt of acting.
- The Bible, Lesson: The problem of suffering
  The problem of suffering. Job refuses the comforters' claim that suffering is always punishment. The book honours protest and leaves the question of innocent suffering open.
Suffering does not equal shame
Augustine’s discussion of violated bodies insists that involuntary suffering does not stain the will. That claim has lasting pastoral power despite difficult surrounding arguments.
- How does Augustine define moral injury?
- Where is his comfort limited?
Related across the library
- The Bible, Lesson: The problem of suffering
  The problem of suffering. Job refuses the comforters' claim that suffering is always punishment. The book honours protest and leaves the question of innocent suffering open.
- Confessions, Lesson: The divided will
  The divided will. Augustine shows that knowing the good is not the same as wanting it wholeheartedly. His account of habit binding the will is one of the first detailed analyses of inner conflict.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Third Chapter. The Creeds Of The Greek Church.
  excludes the Apocrypha and rejects the worship of images He believes that the Church is sanctified and taught by the Holy Spirit in the way of life but denies its infallibility saying The Church is liable to sin hamartanein and to choose the error instead of the truth anti tes aletheias to pseudos eklegesthai from such error we can only be delivered by the teaching and the light of the Holy Spirit and not of any mortal man' Ch XII The doctrine of justification Chapter XIII is stated as follows We believe that ma...
- The History of the Church, Lesson: Suffering can be made meaningful
  Suffering can be made meaningful. Martyrdom turns pain into testimony, but the framing can also aestheticize violence. The work teaches both the power and danger of sacred memory.
- The Quiet American, Lesson: Love can disguise possession
  Love can disguise possession. Both Fowler and Pyle claim to care for Phuong while seeing her through their own needs. Greene asks readers to notice how political and romantic paternalism mirror each other.

Context

The work responds to the sack of Rome in 410 and to a late Roman world negotiating Christianity, classical culture, empire and insecurity.

Composition

Augustine composed City of God between 413 and 426 CE in twenty-two books while serving as bishop of Hippo.

Reception

It became foundational for Christian political thought, medieval historiography, theology of history and debates over church, state and empire.

Faith / Religion Power / Politics Doubt Meaning Death / Mortality Guilt Sin Love Desire Justice Law

Comparisons

confessions
Confessions narrates the divided individual soul; City of God expands divided love into world history.
the-history-of-the-church
Eusebius sees providence in Christian imperial success; Augustine is more wary of identifying any empire with God’s city.
the-republic
Both imagine justice beyond ordinary politics, but Augustine rejects the possibility that a pagan city can achieve the highest good.

Quotes

Frequently cited

“Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self”

"Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self" — Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book XIV, Chapter 28, trans. Marcus Dods (1871).

Related across the library

Confessions, Book VIII.7
Give me chastity and continency, only not yet Augustine recalls his adolescent prayer, fearing that God would answer it too soon.
Persian Letters, Final letter (Letter 161 in the 1758 numbering)
Roxane writes to Usbek after taking poison, declaring her deception and her inner freedom.
On Liberty, Lesson: Unchallenged truths decay into dead dogma
Unchallenged truths decay into dead dogma. Mill argues that even correct beliefs lose their meaning when no one is allowed to contest them. Someone who knows only their own side of a case knows little even of that. Free discussion is defended as a condition of understanding, as well as a safeguard against error.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail, Summary
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail brings together Martin Luther King Jr.'s public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech. His sermons call hearers toward beloved community, nonviolence, courage, love of enemies, moral discipline, and hope under threat. Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in April 1963 after King's arrest...
The Odyssey, Medical lens
The Odyssey is rich for ancient medicine broadly construed: wounds are washed and dressed, sleep is a divine and physiological force, drugs can erase grief or transform perception, and return from war entails psychic and social reintegration. Helen's grief-dissolving drug, the lotus, Circe's potion and Hermes' moly belong to a preclinical pharmacological imagination in which substances alter memory, desire and agency. Odysseus's repeated tears, startle-like caution and concealment can be discussed as trauma read...

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

The occasion in Book I: Alaric's sack of Rome in 410, the charge that Christians caused it, and Augustine's reply that even pagans who fled to the churches were spared by the Goths for Christ's sake.
Augustine's long argument in Book I about the Christian women violated in the sack, including his discussion of Lucretia in I.19. He insists that violence suffered against one's will does not defile a chaste mind, and that suicide is not the answer to shame.
The pirate's reply to Alexander the Great in IV.4, used to ask what separates a kingdom without justice from a large band of robbers.
The turn at Book XI from refuting Rome to telling the history of the two cities, beginning with the angels, and the summary of the whole work in the two loves of XIV.28.
Book XIX on peace, where Augustine weighs the philosophers' definitions of the highest good, defines peace as the tranquility of order, and explains how the heavenly city uses the peace of the earthly city during its pilgrimage.

Key terms and names

Civitas Dei (city of God): The society of angels and human beings who love God above themselves, now partly in heaven and partly on pilgrimage on earth. It is not the same as the visible Church, though the Church is its earthly sojourner.
Earthly city: The society of those who love themselves even to contempt of God, marked by the lust for domination. Augustine traces it from the fallen angels through Cain, who founded a city, to Babylon and Rome.
Libido dominandi: The lust for mastery or rule that Augustine sees driving Roman history, from the founding fratricide of Romulus to the conquest of other nations. In his account it ends by mastering the masters themselves.
Peregrinatio (pilgrimage): Augustine's word for the condition of the city of God in this age. Its citizens live as resident foreigners, using the goods and peace of earthly cities without making them their final home.
Tranquility of order: Augustine's definition of peace in XIX.13, where every part is in its right place. The body, the household, the city, and the universe each have their own peace, and all of them seek it, even in war.
Saeculum: The present age, in which the two cities are mixed together and cannot be cleanly separated until the last judgment. This is why Augustine refuses to identify any empire, Rome included, with God's kingdom.
Sabbath rest: The eternal seventh day with which Augustine ends Book XXII, where the citizens of God's city will rest and see, see and love, love and praise. It answers the restlessness of the whole of human history.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What accusation against Christians prompts Augustine to write City of God, and how does he answer it in Books I through III?
Comprehension What does the captured pirate say to Alexander in IV.4, and what conclusion does Augustine draw about kingdoms that lack justice?
Comprehension According to XIV.28, what love forms each of the two cities, and how does Augustine trace them back to Cain and Abel in Book XV?
Interpretation In Book V Augustine says the Romans received their reward, glory and empire, for the virtues they practiced for the sake of glory. Is this praise of Rome, a criticism of it, or both?
Interpretation Why does Augustine reject Lucretia's suicide in I.19, even though Rome honored her, and what does his argument reveal about where he locates purity and guilt?
Interpretation Augustine says the two cities are mixed together in this age and will be separated only at the end. What follows for how Christians should regard governments, laws, and their fellow citizens?
Big Question If no earthly city can be the city of God, should Christians care deeply about politics, or hold it loosely? Can both be true at once?

Faith Connections

Hebrews 11:13-16 and 13:14 (Scripture)
The patriarchs confess themselves strangers and pilgrims seeking a better country, and the letter declares that here we have no lasting city. Augustine builds his account of the pilgrim city of God on this pattern, tracing it from Abel and Abraham to the Church.
Jeremiah 29:7 (Scripture)
Jeremiah tells the exiles in Babylon to seek the peace of the city where they live and pray for it, for in its peace they will have peace. Augustine applies this verse in Book XIX to the heavenly city's relation to the earthly peace it shares while on pilgrimage.
Psalm 87:3 (Scripture)
Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Augustine draws his title and image from the Psalms, which praise Zion as the city God founded, and he quotes them at the beginning of Book XI as the starting point for his history.
Cicero, On the Commonwealth (De re publica) (Great Conversation)
Cicero has Scipio define a people as a multitude united by agreement about justice and common interest. Augustine argues in Book II and again in XIX.21 that by this definition Rome was never a true commonwealth, and in XIX.24 offers his own definition of a people as united by the things it loves.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Every human society is formed by what it loves; love of self to the contempt of God produces the earthly city and its lust for domination, while love of God to the contempt of self produces the city of God; Rome, like every earthly city, was built by the first love and therefore could not offer lasting peace or true justice; so the fall of Rome refutes neither Christianity nor providence, and the Christian should use the earthly peace while seeking the eternal peace of the heavenly city.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. In XIV.28 Augustine sums up the whole work in a balanced pair of clauses: the earthly city by love of self even to contempt of God, the heavenly by love of God even to contempt of self. The mirrored structure makes the two cities visible as exact opposites built from the same human capacity to love.

Debate: Resolved: Augustine is right that a kingdom without justice is no better than a great band of robbers.

Memory Work

Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self
Book XIV, Chapter 28, trans. Marcus Dods (1871). It states the thesis of all twenty-two books in a single antithesis and gives students a lasting way to ask what any society loves.

Writing Prompts

Essay: In XIX.24 Augustine redefines a people as a gathering of rational beings united by agreement about the things they love. Using this definition and the two loves of XIV.28, argue how Augustine would judge Rome and what he thinks makes a political community better or worse.

Comparison with The Republic: Plato builds an ideal city in speech to discover what justice is in the soul, while Augustine argues that no city on earth can be truly just because only the city of God loves rightly. Compare Plato's just city with Augustine's two cities and argue which gives the more realistic account of what politics can achieve.

Medical Lens

City of God is medically relevant for trauma, rape, suicide, death and the body. Augustine’s early books address survivors of Rome’s sack, arguing that sexual violence does not pollute the soul and that suicide is not justified by shame. Later books discuss mortality, resurrection, disability and bodily integrity. The work also treats political catastrophe as a crisis of hope and meaning, making it important for spiritual care after collective trauma.

Trauma Shell Shock Suicide Sexuality Medicalized Death Dying Grief Plague Epidemic Disability Deformity Philosophy AS Therapy Mind Body

Book 1
Augustine consoles Christians after Rome’s sack and discusses captivity, rape, shame and suicide.
Trauma Shell Shock Sexuality Medicalized Suicide
Book 1
He argues that bodily violation does not morally stain a person without consent of the will.
Medical Ethics Mind Body
Books 13–14
Death, flesh, will and disordered desire are traced to the fall.
Death Dying Sexuality Medicalized
Book 19
Earthly peace is real but fragile, framed against the final peace of God’s city.
Philosophy AS Therapy Grief
Book 22
Resurrection raises questions of bodily restoration, wounds, disabilities and identity.
Disability Deformity Death Dying

Creative Prompts

Essay
Compare the two cities to modern accounts of institutions organized by desire, fear or hope.
Classroom
Ask students to distinguish Augustine’s critique of Rome from simple anti-politics.