Augustine's City of God

When Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in CE 410, Saint Augustine of Hippo (CE 354 – 430) could hardly have imagined that the event would inspire some of his most enduring contributions to medieval philosophy. While barbarians pawed at the city gates, the terrified citizenry searched desperately for a scapegoat, and adherents to the old religion blamed the imperial capital’s misfortunes on the abandonment of the pagan gods for the Abrahamic one. Augustine’s original aim in writing The City of God – generally considered his masterpiece alongside The Confessions – was simply to dispel this myth. It was the old gods, not the new, that had brought about this calamity; for the new faith was the true one, and it was only by means of adopting it wholeheartedly that the eternal city would reclaim its former greatness.

And yet, from this rather narrow political aim grew one far grander in scope and farther-reaching in its consequences. Augustine’s apology for the integrity of Christian belief evolved into a detailed disquisition on the deeper aspects of Christian theology. In The City of God, Augustine thus applies the full force of his intellect to a thorough analysis of questions such as free will, the doctrine of original sin, predestination, and sins of the soul and of the flesh. The City of God here becomes much more than the ideal polis; much more than Rome as it should be. For Augustine, it is a state of the soul and a means to eternal salvation.

The Church Father introduces the City of God (and its antithesis, the City of Man) in the following way:

 “…two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God.” (City of God, Book XIV)

He goes on in this fashion for some time, but the gist is already clear from the excerpt. The City of God is one whose inhabitants place god first, before each other and even themselves; a city governed by Caritas (or a pure and selfless form of love for god) and a complete direction of one’s attention away from affairs of this world and toward those of the next.

Critically, it is also a city in which a hefty form of self-sacrifice is demanded of each of its citizens: the complete abandonment of carnal practices (what Augustine calls a life according to the flesh) in favour of a more ascetic and wholesome way of being (a life according to the spirit). It is this very dichotomy between flesh and spirit that divides men, Augustine argues, as is the very reason for the existence of the City of God, and its baser counterpart, The City of Man:

 “…because some live according to the flesh and others according to the spirit there have arisen two diverse and conflicting cities...” (City of God, Book XIV)

Given the historical context, the most obvious subtext here is a political one. On first analysis, Augustine’s attack appears directed at Ancient Roman decadence. The City of Man is the corrupt city of Jupiter that deservedly brought calamity upon itself. Accordingly, the City of God is its exact opposite: the exemplary, utopian polis over which the Christian god – or, more specifically, his earthly representative, the Church – presides, and his holy and just doctrines are generally lived by. In order to save itself, Rome need only do one simple thing: turn away from the first and embrace the second.

On closer reading, however, deeper meanings are to be found. The two Augustinian cities are, not only the cities, respectively, of the pagan deities and the Christian god, but also of Cain and Abel. In other words, they are the dwelling places of god’s elect on the one hand, and, on the other, the leftovers, the reprobates; those who will be saved and those who will be damned. We are naturally speaking of heaven and hell, but also what they represent: light and dark, good and evil. In short, Augustine’s two cities are the Blakean contrary states of the human soul.

St Paul the Apostle

augustine’s influences

The influence of ancient thinkers is so pervasive in The City of God that it prompted philosopher Bertrand Russell to observe, in his History of Western Philosophy, that there is little that’s fundamentally original in Augustine’s work. And whilst this may be slightly hyperbolic, it is true that two sources in particular stand out as having significantly shaped Augustine’s thought: Saint Paul the Apostle (c. CE 5 – c. 64), and Plotinus (c. CE 204 – 270).

From Paul and Plotinus, Augustine inherited, among other things, his disdain for the flesh. In Paul’s Epistles to the Romans, it is written:

 “The concern of the flesh is death, but the concern of the spirit is life and peace. For the concern of the flesh is hostility toward God ; it does not submit to the law of God, nor can it; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” (Romans 8)

…which is echoed in Plotinus:

The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter, is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue-form: they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are hindrances to the soul. (Ennead 1.8)

In the latter, the language is decidedly Platonic, and herein lies Plotinus’ importance to Western philosophy. The Hellenistic philosopher, who is generally considered the first neo-Platonist, singlehandedly introduced the philosophy of Plato to Augustine, who then eagerly Christianised it (Augustine, in fact, is said to have remarked that Plotinus was a man ‘in which Plato lived again’). Plotinus’ best-known works are his six Enneads, in which he sets out his neo-Platonic vision of a dualistic universe, one divided into two realms: the first, an inferior realm of physical particulars; the second, a pure realm of ideal forms that are perfect and ideal incarnations of the former.

The first is the world we live in. It is full of objects we can hear, feel, see and touch – but we must not be tricked into relying on them, in our pursuit for truth, simply because we can perceive them. They are but partial versions of the ideal forms they represent, and are therefore misleading. Truth is to be found in the second realm, the dwelling place of eternal and immutable ideas, and is therefore not accessible to our senses

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Substitute ‘City of God’ for ‘realm of ideas’ and ‘City of Man’ for ‘realm of physical particulars’, and you have Augustine dished up ready to eat. The ultimate ‘immutable and eternal’ idea, of course, is god. He is described in this very way, in fact, by not only Augustine, but also Aquinas almost a millennium later in both his Summa Theologica and his Summa contra Gentiles. God was the very essence of perfection, beyond taint and beyond change. And while it may appear commonplace to us, 1700 years on, to hear him profiled in this way, it is hard to imagine how he may have come to acquire this specific set of attributes without the platonising influence of Plotinus on Augustine.

Another idea Augustine inherited, in this instance from Paul specifically, was the notion original sin. Since time immemorial, Paul argues, humanity has been tainted by a heinous moral crime perpetrated by Adam, the first man. When Adam’s spouse, Eve picked an apple from the tree of knowledge, an act expressly forbidden by divine command, and offered it to Adam, the blissful union man had thitherto enjoyed with god was annulled.

The apple of knowledge was the devil’s fruit, and Adam had thus committed the ultimate sin. He had betrayed his hunger for an empirical understanding of earthly things – what we would now call scientific truth. By eating the apple, Adam had chosen man’s knowledge over god’s faith; a love for the material things of this world over the spiritual things of the next. There was only one way god could deal with Adam’s insubordination: by ejecting him forever from the Garden of Eden.

As his direct spiritual descendants, we, each one of us, carry the burden of Adam’s mess-up with us:

 Therefore, just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned… (Paul: Romans 5)

 ...an idea that Augustine gleefully adopts and develops, specifying that it was not god’s fault that things turned out so badly for us, but entirely our own. God had created man righteous, endowing him with the sense to tell right from wrong, and the will to choose between them. If Adam had eaten the forbidden fruit, it was because he’d ‘fallen away’ from god; evil had entered him by his own doing, not because god had put it there:

 Accordingly God…made man upright, and consequently with a good will...But the first evil will, which preceded all man’s evil acts, was rather a kind of falling away from the work of God…And therefore the acts resulting were evil, not having God, but the will itself for their end; so that the will or the man himself, so far as his will is bad, was, as it were, the evil tree bringing forth evil fruit.” (City of God, Book 14)

God could therefore wash his hands entirely of this sordid business. He’d done everything in his power to set man on the right course, but by choosing evil over good (or, in this specific case, knowledge over faith), man had failed god and himself, and had to be punished for it.

Since Adam’s fall, we are thus born in a state of ‘universal bondage to sin’:

It is written : ‘There is no one just…there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks God. All have gone astray; all alike are worthless; there is not one who does good…’” (Romans 3)

And if we are all inherently wicked, it can hardly be surprising if most of us end up fairing poorly in this life and, more importantly, in the next. Reprobation – or the state of being predestined to eternal damnation – is, in fact, the norm rather than the exception, and the only way to have any chance at all to avoid it is to wholeheartedly embrace Christ, the light and the way.

It is along this axis that that main elements of Augustine’s philosophy intersect. Before the fall, we had dwelt alongside god in his heavenly city, the Platonic realm of immaterial and immutable things. Since all our spiritual needs were provided for, we lived in a state of fullness, and were want for nothing. We had no use at all for empirical knowledge, which can only lead to wickedness, but only for faith. But then we committed the ultimate sin, the sin of turning our back on god’s eternal and immutable truth in favour of the world’s false, perishable materiality. We thereby severed all ties with the City of God and entered the City of Man, or Plato’s dwelling place of all things imperfect and perishable. This is the realm of the flesh, in which we have since languished in a state of inborn wickedness. It is also the realm of the fallible senses, in which physical objects conspire constantly to corrupt us by steering us away from god’s truth. Since we’ve lost our innocence, our union with god, we must regain it. And the only way to accomplish this is to seek out Christ and fully embrace a life of the spirit. This is how we make our way back to the City of God whence we were exiled.

The Augustinian legacy

From Augustine’s reworked Pauline and Platonic metaphysic, there emerged a number of ideas that would go on to be immensely influential, in the West, for the next thousand years. Chief among these are the inescapable baseness of human nature and the futility of human-focused living.

If the things of this world are unreal, then following them can only lead one into falsehood, and therefore to damnation. In order to ensure salvation in the next life, one must thoroughly shun the things of this one. Investing in worldly, human affairs is not only pointless but dangerous; as is attempting to understand the world by means of sense-based investigations. The only principle worth living for is god, and only god (in the precise form of Christ the logos) can illuminate the mind with the truth.

It is not difficult to intuit the enormous impact that such a god-obsessed and man-shunning metaphysic had on civilisation. For centuries, it impeded economic growth and the development of experimental science, delaying the rise of the middle class and the scientific revolution until the fifteenth century. It also contributed directly to retarding progress along other important human parameters: medical care, sanitation, communications technology, urban planning, education and countless others. Clearly, if the focus in this life was merely to prepare oneself for the next, the accumulation of wealth and the raising of the standard of human living would have appeared endeavours of little relevance, scarcely worth any time and effort.  

In the arts, Augustinian philosophy spawned a theocentric aesthetic that discouraged individual creative brilliance and downplayed the importance of authorship. For much of the Dark Ages, a period beginning with the fifth-century Barbaric invasions and ending around 600 years later, few if any philosophers, poets, composers or painters emerged who are still today regarded as having made pivotal contributions to their field. After the period in question, the West endured a further 400 years of creative semi-barrenness during which authors were known, but only partly – and less for their artistry than the degree of their endorsement of the prevailing Christian metaphysic.

In medieval literature, references, more or less explicit, to Augustine’s heavenly city are pervasive. When Beowulf is called upon, by the king of the Danes, to free his noble mead hall from the tyranny of the monster Grendel, he is defending none other than god’s holy realm against pure evil. When, in Piers Ploughman, Will conjures up images of mountain-top towers and dark dungeons, he’s seeing visions of Augustine’s dwelling places of good and evil. And then there are the Chansons de Geste, twelfth-century tales of Christian repulsions of Saracen invasions, in which Augustine’s Christian/Pagan dichotomy is revised to suit the contemporary political context.

It would be centuries before Western philosophy would completely disentangle itself from Augustine’s stranglehold. After him, all major Christian philosophers to Aquinas fell under his spell in one way or another. By way of concluding, it might be possible to say that the Platonic/Augustinian adversity to all things material has survived to the present day, and manifests itself in truisms like “money can’t buy happiness” – even when, in a world as materially-oriented as ours, they aren’t necessarily consistently applied.