Shepherd's Notes: City of God

By Dana Gould and Terry L. Miethe

Shepherd's Notes- Christian Classics Series is designed to give readers a quick, step by step overview of some of the enduring treasures of the Christian faith. They are designed to be used along side the classic itself- either in individual study or in a study group. The faithful of all generations have found spiritual nourishment in the Scriptures and in the works of Christians of earlier generations. Martin Luther and John Calvin would not have become who they were apart from their reading Augustine. God used the writings of Martin Luther to move John Wesley from a religion of dead works to an experience at Aldersgate in which his "heart was strangely warmed." Shepherd's Notes will give pastors, laypersons, and students access to some of the treasures of Christian faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BH Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9781433671906

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INTRODUCTION

Augustine of Hippo was one of the great thinkers of all time. Born in Northern Africa more than 1644 years ago, he studied rhetoric in Carthage and Rome. As a young man he was attracted philosophically to Manichaeism, skepticism, and Neoplatonism. At age thirty-four he became a Christian and was ordained in A.D. 395. Little in his family background would suggest that he would become one of the foremost defenders and theological architects of the Christian faith and a major philosophical influence in the West. Both Reformers and Roman Catholics look to Augustine as theirs. In his many works one finds the nuclei of most of the ethical thought from his time to our own. After forty years of literary productivity, he died in 430.

Augustine was a passionate writer, as anyone who has read his Confessions knows. Many scholars consider Confessions to be the outstanding spiritual autobiography by a Christian. Contemporary readers see facets of their own lives in Augustine's story. His early struggles with Manicheans and Donatists stimulate present-day debates on the perennial problems of evil and church politics. His exposition of Christian teaching in essays such as Christian Instruction and The Trinity remain source-works for modern-day theologians of a variety of viewpoints. His commentary on Genesis raises questions about the ultimate origin of the cosmos and on the relation of secular science to religious beliefs—questions still very much alive today. His meditations recorded in (and titled by Erasmus) the Enarrationes on the Psalms, his longest writing, have been the seeds of countless sermons and works of piety.

Next to the Confessions, Augustine's best known work is the City of God, a vast exploration of the meaning of history. Scholars have considered his little dialogue, the Soliloquies, as in a class by itself, as an example of spiritual introspection. His hundreds of still-extant Letters and Sermons are living witness to the similarities between us and our long-distant forerunners.

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Plato (428/7–348/7 B.C.) of Athens was perhaps the first real philosopher, certainly one of the greatest. Plato is famous for his theory of the Forms. Neither physical objects nor simply logical symbols, these ultimate Forms of reality have objective existence. The physical world imperfectly imitates these forms and is in constant flux. For Plato, Forms were unchanging points of reference that gave the world meaning and order. People are born with innate knowledge of the Forms, and by questioning—the Socratic method—they can remember the ultimate knowledge they already possess. Plato was the most famous pupil of Socrates (c. 470–399), and Plato's most famous student was Aristotle (384–322).

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Some of the more important aspects of Augustine's thoughts are: (1) God is pure being—immaterial, eternal, immutable—and a unity. In this view, he was influenced by Plato (427–347 B.C.) and Plotinus (A.D. 205–70). (2) The soul rules the body, and its spiritual condition causes good and evil. (3) Humans have free will, and evil exists because they choose it. Evil is a lack of good, not something that exists. For that reason, God could not have created it. (4) The human soul can take part in the divine ideas of God and His will. (5) God can illuminate the soul. (6) Humans are corrupted by sin and cannot reach God or salvation by themselves. (7) Faith is a gift of God. (9) The gospel must be preached so humans can come to faith. (10) The Trinity is one and the same without distinction. Perhaps more than any other writer, his thought defined the teaching on the Trinity, conditions for waging a just war, and the original sin of Adam and Eve.

Augustine was the source of much that is most characteristic in Western Christianity. Indeed, it would be hard to overestimate his place in history. His works greatly affected Calvin, Luther, and the Reformation. He was called the first modern man by Adolf Harnack. Pope John Paul II called Augustine the common father of our Christian civilization. In 1986 Time magazine called Augustine The Second Founder of the Faith (following Jerome, the translator of the Latin Bible).¹ In 1998, Vernon Bourke, arguably the most famous living Augustine scholar, on the eve of his 91st birthday, wrote: More and more I'm realizing that Augustine helped to mold the Christian Church after 400 A.D. He is really the only African writer influential in all later centuries.

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Plotinus (c. A.D. 205-c. 270) was born in Egypt but settled in Rome in 244. He was considered the foremost Neoplatonist thinker. Reality, in his system, is to be found in the spiritual world accessible to reason; the material world is in comparison unreal, created by the soul through the imposition of forms. The ascending degrees of reality are matter, soul, reason, God (who is pure existence). The moral aim for man is to achieve purification through discipline and thus to ascend to the spiritual world through love of the Divine. For Plotinus, the Good or the One was beyond being, essence, or knowledge. This causes a serious problem of the relatedness of God to the physical world. This problem has been carried down through Western philosophical thought.

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The serious student of Augustine will soon realize the importance of chronological order to understanding Augustine's thought. One illustration of this lies in the area of human freedom and the workings of divine grace. In the early philosophical treatises (such as On Free Choice) he stressed the role of free will throughout man's moral and religious life. But he spoke little there about divine grace. Later, as a bishop involved in lengthy discussions with Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians, Augustine emphasized the need for divine help in all that we do. He said that we can perform no meritorious acts without the assistance of God's grace. To those who read only the later works, he may appear to be teaching complete predestination of man's decisions, but to others who concentrate on the early writings he is a champion of personal freedom.

INTRODUCTION TO THE

CITY OF GOD

Augustine lived in a turbulent time; A.D. 410 is a pivotal year in history. On August 24, 410, Rome, the Eternal City, was captured and sacked by the barbarians. Marcus Aurelius, for years battling on the frontier, had foreseen the danger as others had. During this crisis, which must have seemed like the end of the world, the church responded with an answer for all time. Augustine, bishop of an obscure town (Hippo) in North Africa, said the true cause of calamity was to be found in the moral decay of Roman society.

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Augustine will either irritate you or fascinate you. He will never simply placate you. You will either have a passion for him or you will be infuriated by him. There is very little middle ground with Augustine of Hippo.

—Michael Marshall, The Restless Heart

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The sack of Rome by the Goths signaled the death of the Roman Empire. Chaos reigned. As Vernon Bourke said:

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In the opening chapter of his Retractationes, Augustine's last review of his writings, he offered his own advice on how to read him: Whoever will read my little works in the order in which they were written will perhaps discover how much progress I made in writing.

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Throughout the Roman world, astonishment was followed by recrimination: one persistent rumor was that Christianity had sapped the strength of Rome. The officials and citizenry of Rome were still divided into Christian and pagan groups. It takes no powers of imagination to picture the situation.²

The specific occasion for the writing of this historic book was a letter to Augustine by a Roman official in North Africa, a Christian named Marcellinus. In 412, he wrote to tell Augustine of the charges against Christianity and asked him to show them to be false. Thus the City of God (De civitae Dei) was born!

To be sure, Augustine's answer was long and complex. He argued that it was certainly not Christians or Christianity that brought the great calamities on Rome. Rome had been built on the frugality, strength and purity of its way of life. It had ceased to practice these virtues and was reaping the consequences of its moral decadence. The wickedness within the Empire had been described so often by its own historians, poets, and even some emperors.⁴

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"When Rome was devastated as a result of the invasion of the Goths under the leadership of Alaric, the worshippers of the many false gods, whom we are accustomed to call pagan, began, in their attempt to blame this devastation on the Christian religion, to blaspheme the true God with more bitterness and sharpness than usual. Wherefore, fired with a zeal for God's house, I determined to write my book, The City of God, against their blasphemes and errors."³

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Augustine was not embarrassed by the former greatness or prosperity of ancient Rome. Far from it. God has allowed this temporal greatness, which was obtained through mere civic virtues,...in order that no one might be deceived about the proper end of the Christian virtues. According to Augustine, in his letter to Marcellinus in 412, by permitting ancient Rome to prosper without them, God made manifest the supernatural ideal of the Christian virtues.⁵

Thus, much to his credit, Augustine was not satisfied with criticism of the evils of the situation in which he found himself. Rather he

Reviews for Shepherd's Notes

[abvm-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This whole series is excellent

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Zeer veel polemiek en tekstexegese. Vooral in het eerste deel herneming van thema’s uit de Belijdenissen, maar gebalder.Zoals voorheen : soms geniale inzichten (oa relatie God-tijd), maar soms ook de meest stompzinnige redeneringen (oa speculatie over verrijzenis in het vlees en hoe het er dan aan toe zal gaan).De these van de stad van God wordt toch niet echt systematisch uitgewerkt ; wel overheerst het hoofdinzicht dat die stad ook nu al op aarde doorwerkt (als in den vreemde vertoevend).Boeiende, maar taaie lectuur

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of my favorite works. Yeah, I know you're skeptical, but here me out. I've begun my quest to read the basic works of western man beginning with Gilgamesh and in sequence reading through to the present. It's a lifelong ambition. I've read most of the ancient works of some repute, including Roman histories from Greek and Roman historians. When I arrived at 411 AD, I picked up The City of God. Shortly after the first sack of Rome, Augustine wrote it not as an apology for the claim that Christianity was responsible for the decay of Rome, but as a defense against that allegation. He then summarizes the histories as recorded to show internal corruption, incompetence, immorality and the quest for wealth caused the decay - not Christianity. I read the same material he did! That's way cool! I knew exactly what he was saying and with what facts he prosecuted his claim. Then he projected that even if the City of Rome were to fall, Christians can look forward ultimately to their City of God. A great book.

[scarchin-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not going to pretend to have understood more than 10% of what I read/listened to.My recommendation to any layperson who is planning on reading this is - don't.If I could do it again, I would read it as part of a class or read something more accessible that summarized the essential and relevant points.

[carolfoasia_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh my word, this is a masterpiece. I had read his Confession years ago, but I wish I had read this first. I would have been more interesting in finding out about his life after reading this. It is rich in doctrine. After reading Greek/Roman Lives and all the conflict and stife, it was lovely to sit down with a man who knew God, the Word, and knew how superior God is to the Greek/Roman gods! It dovetailed so nicely with my time in the prophets this year too! So many things come from this book. If you want to understand Western Civilization, this book is a must read.

[mattries37315 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

As a backlash against Christianity grew after the sack of Roman in 410 AD, Augustine of Hippo took up his pen to respond to pagans and philosophers as well as inform Christians about their priorities between heaven and earth. The City of God is one of the cornerstones of medieval Christianity and thought that even influences the world today.Augustine divides his work into 22 books divided into two parts. The first part was to refute the accusation by pagans that the sack of Rome in 410 AD was punishment for abandoning the gods of Rome for Christianity. Throughout the first ten books of his work, Augustine critiques the Roman religion and philosophy from the multitude of deities and the contradictory beliefs related to them as well as the conflicting philosophies that supported and opposed them. The second part, consisting of the last twelve books of the work, discussed the titular City of God and how it relates with the city of man—the present world.Augustine’s critique of pagan religion and philosophy in the first part of the book is honestly the highlight of the book. Not only did he defend Christianity but also exposed the contradictions within pagan religious beliefs a well as numerous schools of philosophies which defended or opposed those beliefs. If there was one downside within the first part, it would have been the troubling theological ideas that Augustine espoused that seemed more based on Plato than the Bible. However, it was in the second part of book that Augustine’s faulty theology truly became apparent so much so that I had to begin skimming through the text to prevent myself from contradicting Augustine in my head instead of reading. While not all of Augustine’s theology is wrong, God’s omniscience and human free will is an example, some of the defining examples I want to cover is the following: the immortality of the soul and eternal burning in hell connected to it, the claims that passages from the Old Testament are analogies for Christ and the church, that all of Psalms are prophecies written by David, the angels were created on the third day, and many more. It became too frustrating to stay focused and I admittedly might have skimmed over some of Augustine’s better theological arguments, but it was that or tossing the book.City of God is both the refutation of pagan Roman practices and the theological understanding of Augustine for Christian believers. It’s importance for medieval Christianity and thought cannot be underscored enough, however that does not mean that every reader should not look at it critically.

[ireneattolia · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

love yourself and avoid at all costs

[ostrom_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My goodness, what a difficult book. To some degree, it was a response to the fact that Rome was sacked by barbarians.

[a1abwriter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So far I've read 300 pages of how Rome was the best and worst place every but, its picking up unfortunately putting it down and reading something else for right now(update)Finished it and I would say skip the first 300 pages (unless you want a Ancient Roman history lesson) and dive right into the Diamond of Christian theology that this is. An amazing read and piercing right to the soul of matters STILL relevant to today.

[matthewgray-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a theological classic, a huge work. Best parts are where he discusses issues of predestination, the source of evil, the history and source of pagan religions and the reality of demonic powers. Also his discussion and interpretation of Revelation 20 and the millennium; and his extensive discussions on Genesis. In some places it might be alleged that he held views akin to Roman Catholicism in regard to purgatory and the sacramental and ecclesiastical system. However, this is not a major part of this work and much of it must be understood in the context of the 4th and 5th century, not in the context of Roman Catholicism from the 13th century onwards. The major weakness I feel in this work is his over-emphasis on the immortality of the soul, something which he admits is in line with Platonist philosophy. This is not established Biblically. He is morally conservative, in a liberalistic pagan society, this we need to take note of in the church today. Overall this is a great work to read, written by a great man, although let us remember he was still but a man. Very glad to have read it - worth the effort.