Augustine in His Own Words
chapter 9
Controversies (III) On the City of God, Against the Pagans
On the City of God (De civitate Dei) is Augustine's third masterpiece. It is, as he admits in his final words, "a huge work," running nearly 900 pages in the Latin original.1 Its scope is epic, an ambitious meditation on the contours and meaning of human history, from the genesis of the human race to its final judgment. It received rave reviews from the beginning. In 413, Macedonius, the powerful Vicar of Africa, read the first three books and proclaimed: "I am in doubt what to admire most in them: the lofty state of the priesthood, the teachings of philosophy, the extensive knowledge of history, or the charm of their style, which is such as to bewitch even the unlearned."2
Many today treat City of God as a classic in the history of political thought. Such a reading has certain merits. Augustine consciously draws on and positions himself over against a long tradition of classical political thought, from Plato's Republic to Cicero's. He meditates repeatedly and at length on the topics germane to political philosophy: the right ordering of human society and the foundations of government, the duties of citizens and the qualities of good rulers, the quest for civil peace and the demand for social justice, as well as the waging of wars, whether just or unjust. Augustine's penetrating insights into these matters, while far from systematic, would become a touchstone and massively influential resource for later medieval theorists and beyond.
But reading City of God as political philosophy skews things and miscon-
1. Civ. Dei 22.30 (CCL 48:866). The critical edition of the Latin is 866 pages; the translation in FOTC, volumes 8, 14, and 24, totals just under 1500 pages.
2. Macedonius, preserved in Augustine's corpus as ep. 154.2 (CSEL 44:429); trans. Parsons, FOTC 20:304.