The City of God

What The City of God is

The City of God (Latin De Civitate Dei) is a work of Christian apologetics, philosophy, and theology in twenty-two books, written by Augustine of Hippo between roughly 413 and 426 AD. Its immediate occasion was the sack of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths in 410 and the resulting pagan charge that Rome fell because she had abandoned her ancient gods for Christianity. Augustine answers that charge at length in the first ten books, then turns in the last twelve to a positive account of two "cities" — the City of God and the earthly city — traced from their origin in creation through human history to their final ends.

The two cities are not places but communities defined by love. As Augustine puts it, two loves built two cities: the love of self, even to contempt of God, builds the earthly city; the love of God, even to contempt of self, builds the City of God. The two are intermingled in this world and will only be finally separated at the last judgment. That framework — history as the unfolding story of these two loves toward two destinies — is what makes the book a philosophy of history and not merely a defense of Christianity against one accusation.

Why the two cities still shape how the West reads history

Before The City of God, the dominant way to read history in the Roman world was cyclical or fortune-driven: empires rose and fell, the gods were appeased or angered, and the wheel turned. Augustine cut against all of it. He argued that history has a single shape and a single direction — it begins at creation, runs through the long intermingling of the two cities, and ends at the judgment where they are separated forever. That linear, purposeful reading of history became one of the deepest assumptions of Western thought, carried by writers who never opened the book and inherited the framework secondhand.

The two-cities image also became common property across traditions that otherwise disagree sharply. Catholic political theology drew on it for centuries. The Reformed two-kingdoms and Lutheran two-governments traditions trace much of their framing to it. Orthodox readers engage Augustine more cautiously as a Western Father, but the contrast of loves resonates widely. The book survives all these uses because its central move is not a partisan one: it is the claim that the things people build are shaped by the things people love, and that there are finally only two directions love can run. Different traditions take that in different directions. The text is large enough to hold them.

Books 1–10: the answer to 'who broke Rome?'

The first ten books are Augustine's response to the pagan accusation that abandoning the old gods caused the fall of Rome. He opens by pointing out something his accusers had passed over: when the Goths sacked the city in 410, the Christian churches were honored as places of refuge, and many pagans survived precisely by sheltering in them. He then goes on the offensive. The gods of Rome, he argues across books two through seven, never actually delivered what was claimed for them — they did not guarantee earthly prosperity, they did not protect Roman morals (which collapsed under their watch), and the philosophers who defended them privately did not believe the public cult. Books eight through ten take on the most serious pagan philosophy of the day, the Platonists, crediting them where Augustine thinks they got close to the truth and parting with them on the worship of intermediary spirits.

This is the section that loses most modern readers, and it is worth understanding why before you start. Augustine is arguing with people whose worldview was saturated in Roman religion — he names hundreds of gods, cites the lost antiquarian Varro at length, and assumes you can follow allusions to festivals and rites and authors no longer widely read. To a fifth-century audience this was the live, urgent half of the book; to a twenty-first-century reader it can feel like a tour of a religion that no longer exists. A good edition's footnotes carry you through it. An abridgement trims it. Either way, the payoff is that Augustine clears the ground here so the constructive argument of the second half can be built.

Books 11–22: the two cities from creation to judgment

Then the book turns constructive, and the famous material begins. Book eleven starts at the beginning — creation, the angels, the first division between those who turned toward God and those who turned away. From there Augustine traces the two cities through the whole sweep of biblical history: the line of Cain and the line of Seth, the patriarchs, Israel and the prophets, the coming of Christ, the church in the world. He reads the Old Testament narrative as the slow unfolding of the City of God within the history of the earthly city, the two always intermingled, never fully separable until the end. The final books turn to last things — death, the resurrection of the body, the last judgment, the misery of the lost, and, in the luminous closing book, the eternal peace and the endless Sabbath of the saints.

These twelve books are where the book earns its place. The philosophy of history, the theology of the two loves, the long meditation on peace as the goal of every creature, the closing vision of the city at rest — this is the Augustine that later centuries read, quoted, and built on. The structural challenge is simply that you have to get here. Readers who know to expect a hard, digressive first half and a constructive, soaring second half tend to make it; readers who open to Book one expecting the philosophy of history straightaway often put the book down in the Roman gods. Knowing the shape in advance is half the battle.

The reading decision: full text, abridgement, or translation

More than with most classics, how you read The City of God matters as much as that you read it. The complete text is free in the public domain — the Marcus Dods (1871) translation at New Advent, CCEL, and Gutenberg is complete and accurate, if older in its English. For a modern paperback of the full work, Henry Bettenson's Penguin Classics translation is the balanced default: readable, widely assigned, around twenty dollars, with a helpful introduction. R. W. Dyson's Cambridge translation is the scholarly choice when accuracy and apparatus matter most, and William Babcock's two-volume New City Press edition is the modern critical standard with the fullest notes.

The other real choice is whether to read the whole thing at all. There is no shame in an abridgement here — the long anti-pagan books are exactly what most one-volume condensations trim, and a good abridgement (the Image/Doubleday edition is a common one) preserves the argument and the famous passages while cutting the fifth-century material that stalls new readers. Many people read an abridgement first, then go back to the full text for the books that gripped them. If you want the complete experience, read Bettenson with its notes and give yourself a study plan rather than a deadline. If you mainly want the philosophy of history and the two cities, an abridgement is a perfectly honest way in.

Pricing

Where The City of God falls behind

Sheer length and digression. Twenty-two books and well over a thousand pages, written over thirteen years, with Augustine following tangents wherever they lead. No modern editor would structure a book this way, and the work's size is the single biggest reason admired copies sit unfinished. Many readers are better served by an abridgement than by a full edition they will not complete.

The Roman material assumes a world that is gone. Books two through seven argue against Roman religion in its own terms — hundreds of named gods, lost antiquarian sources, festivals and rites and philosophical schools that meant everything to a fifth-century audience and almost nothing to a modern one. It is not bad writing; it is writing aimed at readers we no longer are. Without good footnotes, much of the early half is genuinely hard to follow.

Translation choice quietly decides the experience. The free Dods translation is complete but reads like the 1870s; an old or stiff edition makes an already demanding book harder than it needs to be. A reader who starts with the wrong text often blames Augustine for what is really a question of edition. Bettenson, Dyson, or Babcock all solve this — but you have to choose.

The famous part is at the back. The philosophy of history, the two cities, the closing vision of eternal peace — the material most people come for begins in Book eleven, more than four hundred pages in. Readers expecting it from the start often stall in the anti-pagan books and never reach the payoff. The structure rewards readers who know the shape going in and frustrates those who do not.

The City of God vs. Confessions vs. Summa Theologica

These are three of the towering works of pre-modern Christian thought, and two of them are by the same author. They do very different things, and choosing between them depends on what you are after.

Different strengths. Confessions is the interior, first-person book — Augustine's own conversion told as a prayer to God, short by classic standards (300-350 pages) and the easiest of the three to love. The City of God is Augustine going outward and large — a public, polemical, panoramic work on history, politics, religion, and last things, far longer and more demanding. The Summa Theologica (Aquinas, thirteenth century) is the systematic synthesis — thousands of short articles in formal disputation covering the whole of theology, vast and rigorous and built on a method that takes its own kind of orientation.

For new readers wanting one Augustine book, start with Confessions — it is shorter, more personal, and the natural door into his mind. Come to The City of God second, when you want his philosophy of history and his account of the two cities, and consider an abridgement for the first pass. The Summa is the most reference-like of the three: almost no one reads it cover to cover, and it is best approached through its famous treatises and a guide. Well-built libraries hold all three because they cover different ground — the inner life, the shape of history, and the architecture of theology — rather than competing for the same shelf.

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