Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Rome fled from her old errors and shook the dark mist from her wrinkled face; her nobility now ready to enter on the ways of eternity and to follow Christ at the calling of her great leader. . . . The world receives you now, O Christ, the world which is held in bonds of harmony by peace and by Rome. These you have appointed to be the chief and highest powers in the world. Nor does Rome please you without peace; and it is only Roman excellence that ensures a lasting peace. Her supremacy keeps order; awe of her power checks disorder.13
Augustine had, for a time, dabbled with such heady optimism, proclaiming in one sermon: "The whole world is now Christ's chorus; from the east to the west, Christ's chorus echoes in harmony."14 But by 410, he had quietly shucked off the remnants of imperial theology. He no longer counted the Christianization of the Roman Empire as a landmark on the map of salvation history. Aspirations for a Christian empire were a mirage. Rome, he now believed, had become one more empire in a long line of empires to rise and fall. It had no sacred significance.
That was not to deny Rome all value—far from it. But its value remained temporal and temporary. Under Rome's aegis, the inhabitants of the earthly city and the City of God made (or, at least, could make) common cause in searching for earthly peace. The elderly Augustine was never one to shortchange peace. He believed deeply that while the best human realities are fraught with ambiguities and shot through with selfishness, still, earthly peace, however fragile, however shortlived, was worth committing to and working hard for. Peace, he recognized, is the very foundation of human civilization; and civilization, while inevitably tainted by original sin and marred by violence, is nonetheless a very good thing. But for Augustine, everyone and everything must, in the end, be seen and judged in eternity's light, from eternity's vantage point. Only in the mystery of God's judgments can history's empires and the loves that create them be judged aright.
Like On the Trinity, this great work took Augustine long years to complete. He began it around 413 and finished around 426. Scattered in his letters are reports of steady progress: three books by 413, five by 415, fourteen by 418.15 Augustine never wrote a summa; but this work comes as close as any to being one. All his great ideas appear here, sometimes in passing, but often at length and in their most quotable exposition. Augustine's favored theological method—setting things in crisp antitheses—controls the larger flow. At one point, he remarks that "the antithesis is the most elegant of rhetoric's
13. Prudentius, Contra Symmachum I.506–II.641 (CSEL 61:238, 270); trans. Markus, Saeculum, 28. 14. En. Ps. 149.7 (CCL 40:2183); my trans. 15. Macedonius reports having read books 1–3 in ep. 154. In ep. 169, Augustine writes his friend Evodius (c. 415) and reports finishing books 1–5. In ep. 184A to two monks, Peter and Abraham (c. 418), he reports finishing books 1–13 and working on book 14.