The Thinker and His Crisis
Aurelius Augustinus (354-430 CE), Bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa, composed De Civitate Dei (The City of God) between 413 and 426 CE in response to the single most traumatic event in late Roman civilization: the sack of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths on August 24, 410. For the first time in eight centuries, a foreign army had breached the walls of the Eternal City. Pagan intellectuals blamed Christianity: by abandoning the old gods who had protected Rome, Christians had brought divine judgment upon the empire. Augustine's response - twenty-two books, roughly 1,100 pages in modern editions - became the most influential work of Christian political philosophy ever written, reshaping Western thought for a millennium and beyond.
Augustine was uniquely positioned for this task. Born in Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria) to a pagan father and Christian mother (Monica), he had been a Manichaean, a skeptic, and a Neoplatonist before his conversion to Christianity in 386. His intellectual journey through the major philosophical traditions of late antiquity gave him the capacity to engage pagan philosophy on its own terms while articulating a distinctively Christian alternative.
Biblical Texts Engaged
The City of God engages virtually the entire biblical canon, but three texts are structurally decisive. Psalm 87:3 - 'Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God' (KJV) - provides the work's title and its governing metaphor. The 'city of God' is not a physical place but a community of those who love God above self, extending from Abel through the prophets to the Church and into eternity.
Revelation 21:2 - 'And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband' - provides the eschatological horizon. The earthly city is passing away; the heavenly city is eternal. Political arrangements are therefore penultimate, not ultimate, and no earthly empire - not even a Christian one - can be identified with the Kingdom of God.
Daniel 2:44 - 'And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever' - establishes that human empires rise and fall according to divine providence, and that no political order endures permanently. This text undergirds Augustine's theology of history, which rejects both pagan cyclicism and naive Christian triumphalism.
Genesis 4 (Cain and Abel) provides the typological foundation: the earthly city is founded by Cain, the fratricide driven by envy and self-love; the heavenly city traces its lineage through Abel, the righteous sufferer. Romans 5:12 ('by one man sin entered into the world') supplies the anthropology: humanity is fallen, and all political institutions are responses to the disordered condition of sin.
Core Argument
Augustine's central thesis is the distinction between two 'cities' - two communities defined by two loves. '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' (XIV.28). This is not a distinction between Church and state, though it was often read that way in the medieval period. The two cities are eschatological realities that interpenetrate historical institutions: there are citizens of the heavenly city within the empire, and citizens of the earthly city within the Church.
Books I-X refute the pagan claim that Rome's fall was caused by the abandonment of the old gods. Augustine demonstrates that Rome suffered catastrophes long before Christianity, that the pagan gods never protected the city, and that pagan philosophy - even at its best in Plato and the Neoplatonists - could not provide what the human soul requires. Books XI-XXII trace the origin, development, and destiny of the two cities through biblical history, from creation through the fall, the patriarchs, Israel, the prophets, the incarnation, and the final judgment.
The political implications are radical. If no earthly city can be identified with the city of God, then no political regime possesses absolute legitimacy. The state is a necessary institution in a fallen world - it restrains evil and provides a measure of peace (the 'tranquility of order,' XIX.13) - but it cannot save souls or achieve ultimate justice. This 'political Augustinianism' desacralized political power and created the intellectual space for the separation of spiritual and temporal authority.
Intellectual Context
Augustine was responding to multiple interlocutors. Against the pagans, he argued that Rome's greatness was never the product of divine favor from Jupiter but was permitted by the one true God for providential purposes. Against Eusebius of Caesarea's Christian triumphalism - which had identified Constantine's empire with the fulfillment of biblical prophecy - Augustine insisted that no Christian empire could claim to be the Kingdom of God. Against the Neoplatonists (particularly Porphyry), Augustine argued that philosophical contemplation alone cannot save the soul; only the incarnate Christ, the mediator between God and humanity, provides the way to God.
Augustine also engaged the Stoic tradition's understanding of virtue and the common good. In Book XIX, he offers a devastating critique of Cicero's definition of a republic as 'an assemblage of people associated in consent to law and community of interest.' Augustine argues that true justice - and therefore a true republic - requires the worship of the true God, which Rome never achieved. This argument created an enduring tension in Western political thought between the demands of justice and the pragmatic requirements of political order.
Reception and Critique
The City of God's reception history is vast. In the medieval period, it was read - often reductively - as a justification for papal supremacy over temporal rulers. Pope Gelasius I (r. 492-496) drew on Augustine's two-cities framework to articulate the 'two swords' doctrine, distinguishing spiritual and temporal authority. The Investiture Controversy (1076-1122) was fought partly over competing interpretations of Augustine's political theology.
The Reformers read Augustine differently. Luther's doctrine of the 'two kingdoms' (Zwei-Reiche-Lehre) drew on Augustine's distinction but applied it more sharply: the spiritual kingdom is governed by the gospel, the temporal kingdom by law, and the two must not be confused. Calvin, while more optimistic about the possibility of Christian political action, shared Augustine's fundamental insight that earthly politics cannot achieve ultimate redemption.
Catholic reception was formalized by Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Immortale Dei (1885), which drew on Augustine and Aquinas to articulate the Church's relationship to modern liberal states. Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes (1965) adopted a more positive stance toward secular political orders while maintaining the Augustinian distinction between ultimate and penultimate concerns.
Secular political theorists have engaged Augustine with increasing seriousness. Hannah Arendt, in Love and Saint Augustine (1929, her doctoral dissertation), analyzed Augustine's concept of love as the foundation of political community. Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian Realism drew heavily on Augustine's anthropology of sin, arguing that human self-interest makes utopian politics impossible. More recently, Jean Bethke Elshtain's Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1995) and Robert Dodaro's Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (2004) have demonstrated Augustine's continued relevance to contemporary political theory.
Legacy and Influence
The City of God is one of a handful of books that shaped Western civilization at its foundations. Its influence can be traced along several axes. First, it established the framework for church-state relations that governed European politics from the fifth century to the Enlightenment. Second, it created a theology of history - the idea that historical events have meaning within a divine plan, but that this plan cannot be fully discerned by human reason - that influenced every subsequent philosophy of history from Joachim of Fiore through Hegel to Marx (who secularized the two-cities framework as the class struggle). Third, it developed a political anthropology - the idea that human beings are simultaneously capable of great good and radical evil - that undergirds modern liberal democracy's system of checks and balances.
Key Passages
From Book XIV, Chapter 28: 'Accordingly, 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, the witness of conscience.'
From Book XIX, Chapter 17: 'But the families which do not live by faith seek their peace in the earthly advantages of this life; while the families which live by faith look for those eternal blessings which are promised, and use as pilgrims such advantages of time and of earth as do not fascinate and divert them from God, but rather aid them to endure with greater ease, and to keep down the number of those burdens of the corruptible body which weigh upon the soul.'
From Book V, Chapter 19: 'For neither do we say that certain Christian emperors were therefore happy because they ruled a long time, or, dying a peaceful death, left their sons to succeed them in the empire... but we say that they are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up amid the praises of those who pay them sublime honors... if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship.'
Contemporary Relevance
Augustine's political theology speaks to several contemporary concerns. His refusal to identify any political order with the Kingdom of God challenges both Christian nationalism (which sacralizes a particular nation) and secular utopianism (which expects political arrangements to achieve salvation). His anthropology of sin and self-interest provides resources for critiquing ideological politics of all kinds - left and right - that promise more than politics can deliver.
The theologian Stanley Hauerwas has drawn on Augustine (mediated through Karl Barth) to argue that the Church's primary political task is not to run the world but to be the Church - a community that embodies an alternative politics of love, forgiveness, and truthfulness. Oliver O'Donovan, in The Desire of the Nations (1996), offers a more Augustinian engagement with liberal political theory, arguing that Western political concepts (authority, justice, freedom) are unintelligible apart from their theological origins. Charles Taylor's monumental A Secular Age (2007) traces the process by which Augustine's two-cities framework was gradually collapsed into a single immanent frame - the 'disenchantment' of the modern world - making Augustine essential for understanding the condition of contemporary secularism.