Augustine in His Own Words
On the City of God 321 yards (Jer 29:5–7). And so they were promised that, after seventy years, they would be liberated from their captivity (Jer 25:12, 29:10).
Now all this has a symbolic meaning and refers figuratively to when Christ's Church, in all its saints who are heavenly Jerusalem's citizens, lives in bondage under the kings of this world. . . . Still, all are directed to remain subject to human and earthly powers until the time foreordained—symbolized by the seventy years—when the Church is liberated from this world's confusion, just as Jerusalem was freed from the Babylonian captivity. . . . This captivity has become an occasion even for earthly kings themselves to abandon idols (on whose behalf they used to persecute Christians) and to come to know and worship the one true God and Christ the Lord. The Apostle Paul commands us to pray for them, even when they persecute the Church (1 Tm 2:1–2). . . . And so through these kings peace was given to the Church—admittedly, a temporary one, a temporary tranquility for building, in a spiritual sense, homes and planting gardens and vineyards. Look, right now, we are, in a way, building you and planting you by these very words. And this is being done across the entire globe as a result of the peace of Christian kings.17
The Sack of Rome
News of Rome's sack by Alaric and his Gothic army set off anguished reflections. In certain sermons preached around 410–411, we glimpse the complex, even contradictory, feelings of both Augustine and his congregation.18 We also see something of his change of mind: whereas in the early 400s he was willing to entertain ideas of a Christian empire, by this point he wrote them off as a false hope. In the following sermon, he reflects on Rome's sack, drawing on images from Luke's Gospel, both Jesus' lament over Jerusalem and Jesus' words: "What father among you would hand his son . . . a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?" (Lk 11:12–13) From Sermon 105:
(9) The city that gave birth to us in the flesh still stands. Thanks be to God! If only it could come to birth spiritually and cross over with us into eter-
17. De catechizandis rudibus 19.31–21.37 (CCL 46:156–62); my trans. On this passage, see Hombert, Nouvelles recherches, 42–43, who notes links between it and the recent Dolbeau sermons, esp. s. 198 (= Dolbeau 26), which confronts pagans at length and in detail, and s. 299A (= Dolbeau 4), which discusses the two cities theme.
18. Others include s. 81, s. 296, and De excidio urbis Romae (On the Sack of the City of Rome, now numbered as s. 397). On these, see J.-C. Fredouille, "Les sermons sur la chute de Rome," in Madec, Augustin predicateur, 349–448.