City of God

What It Is

Twenty-two books of Latin, begun in 413 and finished around 426, written by the bishop of a North African port town while the western empire came apart around him. Alaric's Goths had sacked Rome in 410. Educated pagans blamed the new religion: the old gods had protected the city for a thousand years, and Rome had abandoned them. Augustine set out to answer that charge and did not stop for over a decade.

The book has two halves and they do different jobs. The first ten books demolish Roman religion and the philosophical theology behind it. The last twelve build something in its place, tracing the two communities that give the book its title and its architecture.

It appeared in instalments as he wrote it, and it reads that way: digressions, changes of pace, arguments with men dead for centuries. It runs to some 1,100 pages, and it is not a systematic treatise. It is a very intelligent man arguing for thirteen years.

Why It Matters

Augustine gave the West a way to hold political loyalty and ultimate loyalty apart. The state is not the highest thing; it is not the point of a human life; and no empire, however sacred it thinks itself, is the kingdom of God. Every subsequent argument about church and state runs off that distinction, including the secular versions that would have appalled him.

He also broke with the ancient assumption that history is a wheel — golden ages, decline, renewal, decline again. Augustine proposed a different shape for it entirely. Take God out of that and you still have the shape of every modern theory of progress.

Book 19 is why political theorists keep coming back. He puts a question about justice and legitimacy to every state that has ever existed, and puts it in a form nobody has been able to shake off. He is not being rhetorical. He wants to know what a state is actually for, given that it cannot make anyone good and cannot make anyone happy, and the answer he arrives at is more sober than anything the century that followed him managed. Charlemagne had it read aloud to him. Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Niebuhr and Arendt all worked in its shadow.

Before You Read

This is a long book and an uneven one. Thirty to forty hours, and there is no honest way to make that number smaller.

The first ten books argue with people who are no longer in the room. Augustine spends hundreds of pages dismantling Roman civic religion, the theology of Varro, and gods nobody has sacrificed to in fifteen centuries. It is brilliant and it is dead. Plenty of good readers start at Book 11, where the constructive argument begins, and come back to the polemic later.

If you have limited time and want the political Augustine, read Book 19 on its own. It stands.

Which Translation to Read

• Henry Bettenson (Penguin Classics, 1972) — recommended. The complete text in one affordable volume, in English that moves. Bettenson keeps Augustine readable across 1,100 pages, which no other translator manages as consistently, and the current printing carries a good introduction by G. R. Evans. The cost: he is free where Augustine is knotty, smoothing sentences that were designed to resist, and Penguin gives a book this dense far too few notes. View on Amazon →
• R. W. Dyson (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1998). Complete, single volume, and deliberately more literal; Dyson says plainly that he sacrifices elegance to accuracy. The version political theorists cite. The cost: he was not lying about the elegance.
• William Babcock (New City Press, 2012 and 2013, two volumes). The newest and the best-sounding English. Babcock translates Augustine's scriptural quotations from Augustine's own Latin rather than dropping in a familiar English Bible, which changes the texture of the whole book. The cost: two volumes, a serious price, and the study edition's apparatus is aimed at scholars.

Take Bettenson to read the book, Dyson to argue with it, Babcock if you want the finest English and can pay for it. One warning: the abridged editions on sale cut roughly a third, and what they cut is mostly the reasoning.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction first here. Evans gives context rather than a walk-through, and with a book this size you want your bearings.

Read it in sections over months, not weeks, and keep a note of the argument as it develops. Augustine loses the thread himself and picks it up two books later.

Do not read it as theology in the modern sense. It is a polemic that outgrew its occasion, written by a man who had read everything the classical world produced and was watching that world end. The common mistake is to come for the doctrine. Come for the argument, and for the strange experience of watching someone think at this level in real time.