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.