Questions about "The City of God" (Book XIV) by St. Augustine

Interpretive Questions

Is there a necessary connection between Original Sin and the Two Cities (p. 171)?

Why does Augustine state (p. 172) that both the Epicureans and the Stoics live after the flesh?

What does Augustine mean by the statement (p. 175), "For he who extols the nature of the soul as the chief good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as if it were evil, assuredly is fleshly both in his love of the soul and hatred of the flesh, for these his feelings arise from human fancy, not from divine truth." Is being "fleshly" necessary a bad thing?

P. 177: "And generally in respect of all that we seek or shun, as a man's will is attracted or repelled, so it is changed and turned into these different affections. Wherefore the man who lives according to God, and not according to man, ought to be a lover of good, and therefore a hater of evil." Is it possible to live "according to man" and still be a lover of good?

Why does Augustine consider "impassibility" of spirit but not of body -- a freedom from those emotions which are contrary to reason and disturb the mind -- a "good and desirable quality, but ... not one which is attainable in this life" (p. 181)

What is "clean fear" (p. 181)?

Did Adam and Eve feel sinful inclinations before they committed Original Sin? (p. 183)

Augustine says (p. 184) that God foresaw the Fall. Did he also ordain it?

Why are Adam and Eve both to blame for the fall (p. 187)?

What role did pride, defined as "the craving for undue exaltation" play in the Fall (p. 188)?

Is Augustine being reasonable in asserting that a "friend of wisdom and holy joys" would prefer to beget children without lust, thereby commanding his sex organs with the same "volition" with which he commands other parts of his bodily apparatus (p. 194)?

What does Augustine mean (page 195) when he states that Adam and Eve became ashamed of their nakedness after eating the forbidden fruit because they were "stripped of their garment of grace" and "there began in the movement of their bodily members a shameless novelty?"

Augustine states that the fact that the sex act, even if conjugal, is universally performed in privacy is proof that it's "accompanied by a shameful begetting of sin" (p. 197) Is this an adequate proof?

Is anger also, along with lust, something that did not exist before Original Sin and needs to be restrained by reason "posted as it were in a kind of citadel (p. 197)?

What's the significance of the fact that the injunction "increase and multiply and replenish the earth" occurred before Original Sin and the advent of lust (p. 198)? Could children have been begotten in Paradise before the Fall?

What is the meaning of Augustine's statement (p. 202), "Yet there is less shame when the soul is resisted by its own vicious parts than when its will and order are resisted by the body, which is distinct from and inferior to it, and dependent on it for life itself."

Evaluative Question

How according to Augustine's "thought experiment," would humans procreate without lust? Is this reasonable to believe this could really happen?

P. 189: "There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it." Your thoughts about this?

P. 208: "Why then, should God not have created those who he foresaw would sin, since he was able to show in and by them both what guilt merited, and what His grace bestowed, and since, under His creating and disposing hand, even the perverse disorder of the wicked could not pervert the right order of things?" Why indeed (cf. the next long paragraph).

Textual Analysis

173-74, From "But if anyone says that the flesh is the cause of all vices" ... to ... "the first who lied and the originator of lying as of sin."

184-85, paragraph beginning "But because God foresaw all things ..."

197-98, paragraph beginning "Hence is is that even the philosophers who have approximated..."

201-202, beginning "And therefore that marriage ... to "but these members, like all the rest, should have obeyed the will."

209, Last paragraph of the selection (a summary)

Augustine's City of God

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, was born Aurelius Augustinus in 354 in Thagaste, in current-day Algeria. Although his mother, Saint Monica, was a devout Catholic, his father converted to Christianity only one year before his death. Augustine received a rigorous education that prepared him well to be a man of letters and rhetorician. He tells in his Confesiones ("Confessions"), considered to be the first-ever autobiography, how he joined the Manichean sect in Carthage and had a son with a woman to whom he was not married.

In 387 he was baptized a Catholic in Milan under the auspices of St. Ambrose, and entered a monastic order. He was later called to the public service of the Church as Bishop of the city of Hippo (modern-day Annaba, also in modern-day Algeria, near Tunisia). Even in this highly visible role Augustine accomplished an impressive amount of literary production.

Our reading this month comes from the City of God ("De civitate Dei" in Latin). It is also known by a fuller name, The City of God against the Pagans. In 410, the Visigothic leader Alaric sacked Rome. Augustine's work can be read as a polemic against both Rome's "barbaric" adversaries and those Romans who believed the state's adoption of Christianity under the emperor Constantine to have been a cause of the humiliation at the hands of the Visigoths. The City of God in the 1993 Modern Library edition runs almost 900 pages, but our portion contains only excerpts from Book 14 in which Augustine offers his discussion of the "two cities" :

The one consists of those who wish to live after the flesh, the other of those who wish to live after the spirit; and when they severally achieve what they wish, they live in peace, each after their kind.

A sinner and saint, monk and bishop, thinker and activist, Augustine achieved a reconciliation of opposites throughout his life. He died in 430.