The City of God: Selections and Introduction by Hans Urs von Balthasar

By Saint Augustine and Hans Urs von Balthasar

Few books have impacted the West as deeply as The City of God. Saint Augustine blazed trails not only in the realms of politics and philosophy, but in the life of the heart, exploring the relationship between a loving God and a shattered world. Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne, John Calvin, Hannah Arendt, and Pope Benedict XVI alike have drawn from this text''s deep and varied wells.

Yet few of us will ever read the epic work, which often stretches past one thousand pages. This volume, however, offers a shorter, simpler road through Augustine''s masterpiece. Edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar, it presents key selections from The City of God, culled for their beauty and spiritual power, buttressed with notes, and arranged by theme—from the creation of the world to the Roman Empire, from human happiness to the nature of death.

This edition is meant above all for prayer and meditation. Still, if readers wish to engage Augustine on a critical level, the introduction by von Balthasar—recipient of the 1984 International Paul VI Prize under Pope John Paul II—provides a rigorous analysis of the City, with an eye on the philosophical and theological discourse of the twentieth century. The book is also furnished with a detailed index of names, subjects, and scriptural references.

All excerpts of the City are taken from William Babcock''s 2013 translation with New City Press, praised by critics as "a remarkable achievement" (Johannes van Oort), "the most beautiful and up-to-date of the existing versions" (Arabella Milbank).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642291810

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

by Hans Urs von Balthasar*

1

Augustine’s City of God is not a dogmatic work that stands outside of time, but rather a work of a particular historical context. Thus, introducing a selection from it with systematic perspective presents two alternatives: Should the work be left in its historical framework and contemporary context, thereby losing its interest for our time, or should it be presented in its topical relevance, but in so doing, inevitably losing an essential part of its inner vitality? Or, on the basis of an intrinsic connection between the perhaps very different situations of the past and present, is it possible that we can connect these two alternatives? Can we reflect on the past, in its palpable shock at the coming end of Rome as a world power, as an analogue to the present, which seems to contain an equivalent sense of shock and of danger? If we can compare the different ages—and, indeed, we can—there still remains the question of whether we can declare ourselves satisfied by Augustine’s solution or, since no age can make decisions for another, whether this work is at least helpful to us in our hour of decision.

The following selection from the great work (the author calls it opus ingens in XXII, 30) dispenses with both the thematic expression of the specific polemical situation of late antiquity and Augustine’s actual polemics (though, of course, each will always shine through) because we must concentrate on the theme of Augustine’s positive constructive contribution to the decisive question of Christianity and humanity in general. Augustine gives the work an inevitable structure: the first half largely polemical and de-constructive (destructive), the second part predominantly systematic and constructive. This change in tone at the midway point demonstrates that polemics is ordered and subordinated to systematics, which must always lead.

Such a profound change assumes that the reader of this selection is familiar with the work, which Augustine himself briefly summarized (in the second book of his Retractions). In the summer of 410, Alaric appeared for the third time with his Visigoths. This time he stormed the city and allowed plundering for three days and three nights. Only those who sought refuge in the churches were spared. News of the horrors pervaded all parts of the empire, including the African coastal city, Hippo, where Augustine was bishop. For many, perhaps even for most—whether they were Christian or pagan—the ground appeared to quake with the fall of Rome, which had been declared eternal and invincible since Constantine had made it Christian. Did turning away from the old gods, who were accustomed to victory, cause this disgrace? So murmured the pagans. Were the relics of the apostles not mighty enough to protect Rome? So the Christians desperately lamented. Constantine had removed the pillar of the goddess of victory from the Roman senate; Julian the Apostate had re-erected it. In 382, it disappeared again, but the city-prefect and speaker for the religion of the old gods, Symmachus, submitted a petition to the emperor for the conservation of the altar of Victoria. The prefect predicted the gods’ wrath and judgment if the request were not granted. As representative of the Christian standpoint, Ambrose took up the case with the emperor and argued the reverse: the religion of the true God would provide a much more secure guarantee for the preservation of the greatness of the state—as Constantine’s siege had proven. Soon thereafter, Prudentius made himself a poet for a new Christian Rome (403), and in his great ballad, Emperor Augustus established world peace as the forerunner of Christ and Emperor Constantine founded an eternal Roman empire, such that Rome’s power would no longer be senile and the glory that Rome won would know no elder. In 408, when Alaric besieged Rome for the first time, the city-prefect Pompey is said to have asked Pope Innocent I for permission to offer pagan sacrifice and received the answer: Let him do it in silence for the sake of keeping the people calm; Pompey refrained, since the efficacy of an offering depended upon it being carried out in public. And now Rome had fallen! As long as we could offer sacrifice to our gods, Rome stood and flourished. Now, since your sacrifice triumphs,. . . look what has happened to Rome! So said the pagans. And the Christians: In Rome lies Peter’s body, Paul’s body lies in Rome. . . and still Rome lies miserable, Rome is devastated, oppressed, trampled, burned; how many die by hunger, pestilence, and sword! Where is the memory of the apostles?¹

The bishop replies from the ambo: Lift up your hearts! So are you grief stricken and crying because timbers and stones have fallen down. . . are you grieving over the collapse of timbers and stones? If you have lifted up your heart, where have you got your heart? Is there anything dead there, anything that has collapsed? Your flesh is down below, and if your flesh feels dread, do not let it shake your heart. But why does this happen in Christian times? Answer yourself as a Christian: It is because it was God’s will. This burning of the city of Rome that has just happened is the third occasion. The city that was recently on fire amid the sacrifices of Christians had already been twice on fire amid the sacrifices of the pagans. It was once burned like that by the Gauls, so that only the Capitoline Hill was left. A second time Rome was set on fire by Nero. . . Nero, the emperor of Rome, gave the order; the slave of idols, the slayer of the apostles, gave the order, and Rome was set on fire. ‘I would like to see’, he said, ‘how Troy burned.’ So it was burned in this way once, a second time, and now a third time. Why do you growl against God for a city that has been in the habit of being on fire?

But Augustine felt that such a concise rhetorical response did not do justice to the world historical content of the event; for those who could see, the spirit of the battle of the time was a spirit of struggle that existed throughout history—indeed, eternally visible—and only if expressed explicitly could make this world-event intelligible. Pushed by his friend Flavius Marcillinus, to whom Augustine dedicated Civitas Dei in 413, the almost sixty-year-old undertook an apologetic work that he finished very shortly before his death. He wrote the following about its structure:

Meanwhile, Rome was destroyed as a result of an invasion of the Goths under the leadership of King Alaric and of the violence of this great disaster. The worshipers of many false gods, whom we call by the customary name pagans, attempting to attribute its destruction to the Christian religion, began to blaspheme the true God more sharply and bitterly than usual. And so, burning with zeal for the house of God, I decided to write the books about the City of God in opposition to their blasphemies and errors. This work kept me busy for some years because many other things, which could not be postponed, had to be done first. But finally, this extensive work, On the City of God, was completed in twenty-two books.

(I) The first five of these books refute those persons who think that the worship of the many gods revered by the pagans is necessary for the prosperity of human (i.e., earthly) conditions; they claimed that the prevention of this worship is at present to blame for the terrible misfortune.

The next five books, however, speak against those who admit that these evils have never been wanting and never will be wanting to mortals and that these, at one time great, at another time slight, vary according to places, times, and persons; and yet they argue that the worship of many gods, whereby sacrifice is offered to them, is useful because of the life to come after death. In these ten books, then, these two false beliefs, contrary to the Christian religion, are refuted.

(II) But lest anyone charge that we have only argued against the beliefs of others and have not stated our own, it is just this that the second part of this work, which consists of twelve books, accomplishes; although, when there is need, both in the first ten books I state my own opinions, and, in the last twelve, I argue against those opposed to them.

The first four of the following twelve books (XI—XIV), then, deal with the origin of the two cities, one of which is of God, the other of this world.

The second four books treat of their growth or progress (XV—XVII).

The last four books deal with their destined ends (XIX—XXII). And so, although the entire twenty-two books were written about both cities, yet, they have taken their title from the better one and, consequently, are called On the City of God.²

With this outline, Augustine situates himself on a double polemical front: the first part against the paganism of his time, which was coming to an end. The second systematic part, however, would be aimed at the more hidden and in some way more effective official Constantinian ideology of empire, as had been glorified by Eusebius in his Life of Constantine and as had been continued by Augustine’s own student Orosius, who misunderstood Augustine’s intentions and intimations. Augustine had already completed his somber and pessimistic descriptions of the pagan empire in order to prove that Rome had not first degenerated in Christian times when Orosius visited him in Hippo and accepted from him the task of composing a chronicle of world history in the service of the same apologetical idea. Orosius completed the task with his seven-book History against the Pagans (417-18), wherein he paints the Roman past in dark colors for the purpose of allowing the Christian present to shine brightly in distinction. In the midst of the turmoil of the mass migration, Orosius wished to convince his reader that Rome had never seen so joyful a time and never enjoyed such prosperity, such freedom ruled: the minor sufferings of the present consequently must be endured with grateful patience. For Orosius, the replacement of the pagan Rome with the Christian Rome occurs silently and unproblematically—indeed, for him the history of the world is an apologetics of Christianity, but in the opposite sense, as it is for Augustine. Thus Orosius’ effect on the Middle Ages is understandable: he is to a great extent already the historian of Carolingian ideology.

While Orosius writes world history with a theological bent in order to justify the current course, Augustine’s intention will be to accomplish something entirely different: a justification of historical Christianity and historical Christian existence on the basis of an ultimately supra-historical interpretation of history. If one were to look superficially at the second part of Augustine’s program—as if the two could be separated—one might agree with Heinrich Scholz that this part was written with a view toward history: four books describe the beginning, four the progress, and the last four the outcome of both kingdoms. But what a disappointment for Scholz when he, contrary to his judgment about the adroitly constructed first part of the work, which should be taken as a work of art, discovers the flaws and weaknesses of the second part! Here it stagnates in corners and dead-ends! We certainly should not overlook these weaknesses (the same as ever for Augustine): redundancy, repetition, omissions of important themes, tiring digressions. But the inner framework of the City of God becomes much clearer if one reads the work, not as the history of God’s kingdom on earth, but rather as a development of the theological principles and propositions to which history belongs but—for Augustine at least—has the least to offer, theologically speaking.

2

The first four books of the second part cover, not the historical, but the transcendental, heavenly origin of the kingdom of God; the last four, not the historical end of the world, rather the eschatology that has its telos in the same transcendence; only the four middle books describe the historical appearance of the kingdom of God, which is eternal in itself, and therefore any historical element is located outside of its actuality, in alienation, or on pilgrimage. If we were to use a modern way of speaking, we might say that Augustine is not concerned with the history of the kingdom of God on earth but, rather, with its historicityand that he points out the existential preconditions and requirements for this historicity. While the Confessions describes the Christian path of the individual—namely, of Augustine himself—from self-alienation from God into self-discovery (a discovery that is only ultimately fulfilled eschatologically) in God (conversio, epistrophé), the City of God points to the same truly eschatological conversion, this time writ large, which is as necessary for the individual as for the community, demonstrated by the protological original fall from God.

For Augustine, the historical phases are not important, and in fact they are consistently and consciously brushed over. The kingdom of God, which comes from heaven, is on the earth from the beginning: it is founded in Abel; it does not in any way or respect develop; rather at most it emerges more strongly here and there from its concealment. It is fundamentally the same kingdom in Abel as in Abraham and David; the history from David to Christ is hardly recorded, indeed (somewhat astonishingly), the Incarnation of Christ himself is only incidentally mentioned; there is scarcely a strictly Christological chapter—let alone book—in which Christ is highlighted as the mediator of the whole kingdom of God: the (certainly Christological) essence of the eternal kingdom of God is the exclusive theme and, thereby, the grounding of faithful existence in this kingdom. The external history of the kingdom of Christ to the time of Augustine is not at all described; ecclesiastical history in the modern sense is for Augustine only a part of secular history; the kingdom of God has no history comparable to that of the world.

Presumably Augustine knew the historical importance of the events and the categories of Christianity and at no point would he have wanted to diminish this true historicity in favor of a bare theological existentiality. Of course, the world is temporal; of course, death as a singular event is the end of human life. Of course, Christ was born and died on earth at a certain point in time. Of course, there is a last judgment, which is the definitive act of Christ the Judge. But these historical facts and moments are for Augustine included in the historia, that is, exegetically, in the littera—the texts from and in which the Spirit, the inner sense, must first be articulated and understood—and all of this is about God, or man’s essential relationship to God, and is therefore eternal. Here Augustine is fundamentally in agreement with the Alexandrian school, even if Origen is more strongly inclined (on the basis of his gnosticizing doctrine of prelapserian man) to make history transparent—up to the edge of disappearing—for example, interpreting the last judgment completely spiritually and atemporally.

However, Augustine’s interest is in the a- and supratemporal meaning that is revealed in temporal events. All his speculation about time seeks ultimately to explain time as a structure of earthly existence, a category or an existential of pilgrimage, whereby Augustine—as he so often does—takes up a Platonic concept (time as distance from the eternity of God, as the drawing-out of the soul over against the spirit’s dwelling in itself), in order to illuminate it for the Christian experience. Similarly, in the case of death, Augustine turns his interest away from the punctiform conclusion—first, through a long dialectical maneuver intended to shake up a naïve concept of death: as long as man dies, he still lives, as soon as he is dead, he no longer dies: so when does he actually die?—in order ultimately to emphasize the immanence of death in every moment of mortal and temporal human existence. Finally, in the large Book XX about the last judgment, Judgment Day itself as Christ’s act is described with disproportionate brevity for the sake of giving space to the emphatically highlighted reflections on the immanence of the divine judgment in every moment of the temporal life: Now already God judges, and he has been doing so from the beginning of the human race, in a completely real sense, even if for the time being God’s judgments remain dark and unfathomable; the vanity of human existence, however, which accompanies and shapes every moment, points clearly enough to this divine judgment. We must be careful, therefore, not to apply those words in Scripture that refer to the immanent judgment too quickly to the transcendent judgment. The only epoch that is possibly distinct from the internally uniform time of the Church in the New Testament is the ecclesial last days, which are considered by some as a special time in history: the thousand-year empire, the time of the first resurrection and of the ruling of the faithful together with Christ. Not only does Augustine reject such a millennium categorically, he uses subtle arguments to prove its inner impossibility and, in doing so, dissolves all numerological data regarding the apocalypse (the year that the devil is bound and the year that he is unleashed) into the structure of ecclesial time, which is fundamentally supratemporal and, therefore, always applicable. We can grant that there are slight shifts of accent in treating the epoch of the end times, but they no longer play a role in this interpretation. When we see this, we will therefore no longer be indignant, like Scholz, that in the twelfth book, where Augustine logically (if he had wanted to write a historical account) should have addressed paradise, he deals with almost none of it and, instead, addresses the creation of man and the fall of the angels—that is, the first two existential preconditions of the pilgrim state: the absolute ordering of man to God and the first, still transcendent precondition for his alienation from God. When Augustine addresses paradise extensively elsewhere, he—in contrast to the extreme Alexandrians—holds fast to its historia before he interprets it spiritually; the existence in paradise does not appear to him necessarily significant in the present context: the motivating force of the life of men is not a romantic longing backward for paradise but, rather, a longing forward for God, who stands above paradise and wishes no longer to restore the Adamic, psychic man but, rather, to anoint the resurrected man formed in the image of the second Adam.

It has been mentioned before that in this context Augustine does not emphasize the division between the Old and New Testaments created by Christ’s Incarnation. Just as before Abraham there were already relatives of the kingdom of God, just as there were Hebrews before him, so there are Christians before Christ, namely, all who live their prophetic existence in him. Augustine shares this view with the other Fathers, and it is necessary to understand their argument to understand that of Augustine. Therefore the accounts of the Old Testament—precisely the time in which God reveals himself in history most eminently—are the weakest by far in Augustine’s work because he roots revelation, not in the ground of historical events, but rather in the text of the Scriptures. These, not history, are inspired and point to the coming Incarnation, whether openly or obliquely; the events are indeed images, types of what is to come, but, indeed, only in the objective sense, so that the type-character becomes evident to those who look backward from Christ (or even forward, in the light of a revelation of the word). The inner subjective connection of the faith experience of figures in the Old Testament to the experience of the Christian, indeed, to Jesus Christ himself, is not discussed by Augustine, because the expression of the kingdom of God in the Old Testament is for him confined to a collection of prophetic texts without inner historical connection. The common patristic formula taken up and made famous by Augustine: Novum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet³ clearly shows the limits of patristic exegesis: the veiling and unveiling of the ever-present whole are changes that take place only in the historia, not in the intellectus.

The essential content of the four books that describe the origin of both kingdoms is the discourse on the existential-historical human being, which is never developed very clearly. Besides explaining temporality and what it means to be a creature (Book XI), the original sin of the angels, which is also the partial cause of the fall of man, and its connection with the demonic and the direction of the flow of time away from God (Book XII), there is also a broad treatment of morality and all related questions, and even more broadly of concupiscence (libido) as the most significant condition of fallen human beings, and in this context the doctrine of the passions (pathé), so important for the pagans, is developed in Christian terms (Book XIV). The emphasis and Augustine’s originality lie here, while the following four books, which describe the course of the kingdom of God and the world through history, are filled with much insignificant chronological and chronic ballast. Only the last four books, composed by the septuagenarian bishop, can be most appropriately called eschatological in that they contrast the present state of nature with the true and final state for which we hope. This is served by the doctrine of the renowned fourteenth book, the comprehensive doctrine of end and telos, which, following the lead of the ancient pagan doctrine of pan and finis, superelevates the immanent goals of philosophy in a transcendently Christian way and thereby confers on the city of God its own ultimate foundation in eternity. The last three books address the last judgment and its eternal decision, heaven and hell, and lead to a tremendous apotheosis of the whole redeemed and risen creation.

The central light thus falls on the state of the kingdom of God in exile, on the wandering and pilgrimage through time; the frame of experience and the place of the soul are eminently Neoplatonic, but by no means unchristian: man, humanity, understands itself as the being that comes from God, but has moved away from God, at a distance from him through his own sin, and in longing for faith wanders toward God through personal and world historical time. This is absolutely the truth of man: the origin and end emerge in the structure of this alienation, and existence itself can only be understood and read in the light of the merciful grace of God. For alienation from God means alienation from truth and love—a being cast out into the darkness of deceit and concupiscence, which is the epitome of the lost ordination of the human being: the self-centeredness of earthly existence, the backward curve toward the self of the ray of love that should be aimed at God and neighbor; the consequence of this pride on the hylemorphic structure of man is libido in all areas: lust for glory, power, pleasure, and abuse of all that is good.

3

Here in the purely theological, the purely biblical—where the decision for or against God falls, where the heart either transcends itself by moving toward God or moves away from God and sinks into itself, using any ethical, metaphysical, or even religious reason to justify turning away from God and to itself and the world—here the idea of the two states or "citizenships" is born, which is then (as is the case in the Old Testament) projected polemically into history and has gained astounding power through time and posterity. Originally this idea was about the biblical reality of the final judgment, which cannot be merely temporalized and thus relativized: it falls under the eternal vision of God, and, therefore, its consequences must be carried out into eternity. From the beginning, Augustine separates himself from the ideologically Greek teachings of harmony, which he uses assiduously to clothe his philosophical views—for example, where, following Plotinus, he describes the un-being of evil, which as non-being can have no causa effuiens, only a cause deficiens. Or where, following Varro, he includes the ancient idea of harmony in his eschatology in order to support the likewise ancient doctrine of eudaimonia elevated by Christianity. There are many other examples. Augustine separates himself from the Neoplatonic doctrine of the All-One as sharply as any of the Greek Fathers, which lays the foundation for Western ethical personalism all the way to Pascal and Kierkegaard. He separates the two kingdoms not only during (as is the case of the angels) but even before the history of the world and after it (in the eternity of hell) so sharply that the voices of those who detect a Manichean influence here—at least the Manichean habit of thinking acquired in the many years in youth Augustine spent in the sect—cannot be silenced. It is difficult to judge such unconscious thinking; consciously, at any rate, Augustine no longer felt any inner inclination, however slight, to the Manicheans. His conversion, mediated jointly by Plotinus and Paul, was complete. We could perhaps say that Plotinus suffices to explain Augustine’s eschatological harshness (which affected the Middle Ages as much as the luminous side of his theology)—that is, recasting the Old and New Testament theology of judgment, which is conceived wholly in terms of the inscrutable and personal judgment of God, in the Greek cosmological and ontological categories, especially those of Neoplatonic thought. In most of the Eastern Fathers, Greek harmonization outshines biblical personalism; in others, the balance shifts back and forth, but in Augustine it is not that biblical personalism triumphs over Greek metaphysics, but rather that the latter serves to articulate those observations, accents, and conclusions that upon close inspection cannot be read directly from the Bible. But it took more than a millennium to understand this and to dissolve this marriage of ideas; the Reformation was by no means sufficient, since it is precisely there that the Augustinian shadows again darken; only the biblical studies of our day, detached from the ancient schemas and in combination with the entirely changed situation of the world and humanity, are sufficient to put at least an open question mark behind Augustine’s absolutes in this area. To go any farther is not permissible to Christian thought, which cannot anticipate the divine judgment, as the ecclesiastical condemnation of the other extreme—the simple dissolution of the last judgment into eternal harmony (Origen)—proves. As the great de-mythologizer of the ancient world view, Augustine must tolerate a final de-mythologizing or de-cosmologizing of biblical eschatology (and, therefore, also of his correspondingly narrow interpretation of biblical protology, namely, the Augustinian-Gottschalkist-Calvinist-Jansenist doctrine of predestination) if his positive and truly indispensable influence in the ecclesiastical sphere and beyond is to be developed in the present and future. We can, however, look at the Augustinian seriousness about the divine judgment in a register other than eschatological anticipation: for this we need only remember Pascal (insofar as he is not a Jansenist) or, even better, Kierkegaard (whom we recall here only for this one aspect of his doctrine and position) or the resolutely Christian Charles Péguy. However, the beginnings of such restraint can be found in Augustine himself, who is at his most fruitful in the reduction of history to the historicity of Christian existence and human existence as a whole—that is, when he relocates the inevitability of the decision for or against God into the intimate and most hidden essence of the individual and unfolds the events of history only as an indication, as an indirect echo of this intimate and most hidden decision, but never as its open and direct representation. If this is true—and Augustine confirms again and again throughout his work that in this time of the world, the final judgment is known to God alone, that those who are consecrated in the holy space of the Church can also be without, and those who are outside of it can be within—then ultimately it is really God’s hidden judgment, and there is no need for any foreknowledge of that outcome which is not just possible, but actual. When Augustine deals with the judgment in general and the last judgment in particular (in the twentieth book), he follows the right method: a slow, meditative unfolding of the biblical texts. Everything said about the punishments of hell in the twentieth book should be developed in strict dependence on the texts on judgment and their overall biblical sense.

With the insight that Augustine speaks of the historicity of existence but not of history (which is used only as an example for the Roman city; the history of the city of God, in particular after Christ, hardly appears, even in outline), the way is paved for the investigation of the meaning and scope of the concept of the city of God. The questions about which dimension of reality Augustine wishes to explore with this concept would not be so urgent if his work as the representative theology of history in a very undefined time—summarizing the position of ancient Christianity at its end, influencing a new framework at the beginning of the Middle Ages, and pointing the way beyond both ages to the present day—had not decisively shaped every Christian view of history.

Today it can be taken for granted that Augustine conceived his work in tacit rejection (but what an eloquent silence!) of the Constantinian imperial theology of a seamless replacement of the pagan Roman empire by a Christian one and, thus, also against the newly emerging form of Christian theocracy in the Byzantine East, which also occurred later in the Carolingian-Ottoman West. The figure of the Christian emperor appears only marginally and is drawn mainly ethically, not politically; moreover, Augustine places large question marks next to the political structure of all great empires, which almost endemically fall prey to the demonic ideals of earthly power and worldly prosperity. By far the best solution appears to Augustine to be the peaceful federation of small states—federalism—and more broadly, any form of society that remains most closely related to the political archetype of the natural family. Troeltsch was the first (discarding older Protestant research) to reject sharply the affiliation