Because City of God was written for men of classical learning-custodians of the culture Augustine sought to condemn-it is thick with Ciceronian circumlocutions, and makes many stark contrasts between 'Your Virgil' and 'Our Scriptures.' Even if Augustine's prose strikes modern ears as a bit bombastic, and if his polarized Christian/pagan world is more binary than the one we live in today, his arguments against utopianism and his defense of the richness of Christian culture remain useful and strong. The glory that Rome failed to attain will only be realized by citizens of the City of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem foreseen in Revelation. After the sack of Rome, Augustine wrote this book to anatomize the corruption of Romans' pursuit of earthly pleasures: 'grasping for praise, open-handed with their money honest in the pursuit of wealth, they wanted to hoard glory.' Augustine contrasts his condemnation of Rome with an exaltation of Christian culture. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.Īugustine's City of God, a monumental work of religious lore, philosophy, and history, was written as a kind of literary tombstone for Roman culture.

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Pointing the way forward to a citizenship that transcends the best political experiences of the world and offers citizenship that will last for eternity, City of God is one of the most influential documents in the development of Christianity.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. Written as an eloquent defence of the faith at a time when the Roman Empire was on the brink of collapse, it examines the ancient pagan religions of Rome, the arguments of the Greek philosophers and the revelations of the Bible. St Augustine, bishop of Hippo, was one of the central figures in the history of Christianity, and City of God is one of his greatest theological works.

City of god by augustine of hippo