Evans Gillian Rosemary - Concerning the City of God against the pagans

CITY OF GOD

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

ST AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, the great Doctor of the Latin Church, was born at Thagaste in North Africa in A.D. 354. The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, he was brought up as an aspirant to Christianity but was not baptized. At the age of sixteen he went to Carthage to finish his education. In 375 on reading Ciceros Hortensius he became deeply interested in philosophy. He was converted to Manicheism, some of the tenets of which he continued to hold until he went to Rome to teach rhetoric in 383. At Milan he became Master of Rhetoric and came under the influence of both Neoplatonism and the preaching of St Ambrose. After agonizing inward conflict he was converted to Christianity in 386 and was baptized in 387. He then returned to Africa and formed a religious community; but in 391 he was ordained priest, against his wishes, and five years later he was chosen bishop of Hippo.

For thirty-four years St Augustine lived in community with his clergy. His written output was vast: there survive 113 books and treatises, over 200 letters, and more than 500 sermons. Two of his longest works, his Confessions and City of God, have made an abiding mark on Western theology and literature. He died in 430 as invading Vandals were besieging Hippo.

JOHN OMEARA, an authority on St Augustine and his Neoplatonic background, was born in Eyrecourt, County Galway, Ireland, in 1915 and was educated at University College, Dublin, and Oxford University. He was Professor of Latin at University College, Dublin, from 1948 to 1984, has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, in 1956, 1963, 1968 and 1975 and held a Fellowship from Harvard University at Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine and Mediaeval Humanities Research Center in Washington, DC, from 1979 to 1984. He was Director of Studies on Johannes Scottus Eriugena at the Royal Irish Academy from 1984 to 1989, and has been a Research Associate in Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, since 1984. Among his published works are The Young Augustine, Porphyrys Philosoplhy from Oracles in Augustine, Charter of Christendom: The Significance of the City of God, Understanding Augustine and Studies in Augustine and Eriugena (ed. T. Halton).

HENRY BETTENSON was born in 1908 and educated at Bristol University and Oriel College, Oxford. After ordination and some years in parish work he went into teaching and taught Classics for twenty-five years at Charterhouse. He was afterwards rector of Purleigh in Essex, and died in 1979. His other publications are Documents of the Christian Church, The Early Christian Fathers, The Later Christian Fathers and Livy: Rome and the Mediterranean (Penguin Classics).

ST AUGUSTINE

A NEW TRANSLATION
BY HENRY BETTENSON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY JOHN OMEARA

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First published 1467
This translation published in Pelican Books 1972
Reprinted with a new introduction in Penguin Classics 1984
21

Introduction copyright John OMeara, 1984
Translation copyright Henry Bettenson, 1972
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ISBN: 9781101487488

FEW books have given rise to so much misconception as the City of God. By some it is thought to give a philosophy, by others a theology of history. By some it is thought to contain well-developed political theories, to be hostile to the State as such and in particular to the Roman Empire, and to outline the provinces of an established Church and Christian State. By others it is considered to be primarily a Christian reply to the charge that Rome had been sacked because it had become Christian, as identifying the city of God with the Church, and as teaching that justice does not enter into the definition of the State.

More serious still: the teaching of Augustine on predestination, never accepted in its full rigour by the Church, is, although not prominent, grim and sombre in the City of God. The Pelagian controversy had tended to force him into some exaggeration, at least in his expressions, in relation both to Nature and to Grace. Yet when one has studied Augustines life and works for long, one finds it difficult to believe that he was mainly a pessimist. One comes to expect, and indeed welcome, clear evidence of a countervailing optimism in keeping with a person so vital and so unreservedly generous in the service of man.

The City of God is no more purely theoretical than it is purely theological. It is, of course, mainly theological; but it is at the same time founded upon Augustines own experience. It will be seen that it is an application of the theme of his own development and conversion, as described in the burning pages of the Confessions, to the broader, less immediate, canvas of mans destiny. Augustines reflection upon his experience, especially at the time of his conversion, both in outline and in surprisingly precise details, is the key to much of his characteristic teaching.

We should take warning from this: however much he might regret some of the ingredients of his past, he was happy to recognize that through these experiences Providence had brought him to where, humanly speaking, he felt more secure. His attitude, therefore, to these things could not be wholly negative and condemnatory. On the contrary he formed from the pattern of his life a theory of providential economy that to many might seem both too living and too tolerant. If Rome and the philosophy of the Greeks could, for all their error, not merely not prevent him from accepting Christ and the Christian revelation, but actually encourage him to do so, why should they not be equally as useful to others to all mankind? It might seem paradoxical, for example, that the bitterest enemy of the Christians, Porphyry, should through his writing play a significant role (along with other Neoplatonists) in Augustines conversion. This, however, happened, and Augustine was willing to take account of it in his notions of the dealings of Providence with men.

It can be said that although the scope of Augustines writings is immense, they are animated by a few central ideas that came to him from a sensitive brooding on his own life. Thus the leading ideas of both the