Collection

The City of God (De Civitate Dei)

Augustine of Hippo

Begun in the years after Alaric's Goths sacked Rome in 410, this vast apologia answers pagans who charged that the catastrophe followed from Rome's abandonment of the old gods. Augustine's reply grows from a pastoral defense of Christian refugees into a sweeping account of two cities — one built on love of self, the other on love of God — whose intertwined histories run from creation to judgment. The early books prosecute Roman religion using Rome's own historians and antiquarians, chiefly Varro, before the argument turns to the philosophers and the Platonists whose proximity to Christian truth Augustine both honors and contests. The prose moves between polemic, forensic argument, historical catalogue, and metaphysical reflection, shaping a framework for Western political theology that would remain in force for a thousand years.