Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
strues Augustine's fundamental purposes. The work is explicitly (and especially in its first half) a work of controversy. We have seen Augustine the controversialist in previous chapters on the Manichees and Donatists. Augustine's target in City of God is paganism. Many early manuscripts add a subtitle: Against the Pagans.3 While this subtitle did not, in all likelihood, come from Augustine himself, it is accurate as far as it goes. The work was occasioned, as he himself notes, by Alaric's sack of Rome in 410. The Goths spent three days wreaking havoc and brutalizing the city's inhabitants. Thousands, both Christians and pagans, packed city churches, desperately seeking asylum. However horrific the actual scene, the destruction was, in the end, short-lived and minor. The deeper impact was psychological. The thousand-year success story that had been the history of Rome seemed irretrievably damaged. Not merely Rome, but also the broader Empire now seemed, almost overnight, vulnerable, fragile. Jerome, in far-off Bethlehem, was shaken to the core: "Where is salvation if Rome perishes?"4 Pagans, especially aristocratic traditionalists, attributed Rome's sack to the Empire's embrace of Christianity and its neglect of its traditional gods, who had so long been venerated as Rome's supernatural protectors and the guarantors of its success and peace. So in the first 10 of 22 books, Augustine dismantles pagan charges at length and in detail. This massive work thus stands in a centuries-long tradition of Christian apologetics, pioneered by Justin Martyr and Athenagoras, later broadened and deepened by Tertullian and Origen. Augustine's work has been called the finest Christian apology of antiquity.
Its title, as Augustine notes at various points, comes from Ps 86:3: "Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God."5 The choice is ironic since pagans were hardly saying glorious things about Christianity and Christianity's God. Augustine had tinkered for decades with the idea of human history as an interweaving and clash between two cities, the earthly city and the City of God, or, as they appear in their classic biblical guise, between Babylon and Jerusalem.6 In one of the newly discovered Dolbeau sermons, Augustine gives a thumbnail description:
3. Gerard O'Daly, Augustine's City of God: A Reader's Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 273, argues that contra paganos was an addition from later editors, basing his judgment primarily on Augustine's references to the work in retr. 2.69, in his letters (ep. 169.1; 184A.5; 1A*.1–2; 2*.1), and in other writings (Contra adversarium legis et prophetarum 1.18; Trin. 13.9.12).
4. Jerome, ep. 123.16, quoted in Lancel, Saint Augustine, 392. 5. Civ. Dei 2.21, 10.7, 11.1 (CCL 47:55, 47:279, 48:321). 6. On the "two cities" theme, see A. Lauras and H. Rondet, "Le thème des deux cités dans l'oeuvre de saint Augustin," in H. Rondet, ed., Études Augustiniennes, Théologie 28 (Paris: Aubier, 1953), 97–160; also Johannes van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine's City of God and the Sources of His Doctrine of the Two Cities, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1991).