Sacking the Rome
The stimulus behind Augustine’s writing City of God was sacking of Rome in the year 410 by Germanic barbarians. The response was not to the barbarians, but rather to the citizens of Rome that were moved to blame the influence of Christianity on the empire for the invasion. Almost like a checklist, part of the thematic fabric of City of God is responding to each of the charges against Christianity that covers the gamut from suggesting the sacking was the handiwork of the pagan gods the Church rejected to what they considered the religion’s misplaced emphasis on the concept of an afterlife.
Free Will
As the text expanded to become a consideration of Christianity as a religious philosophy, Augustine takes on the difficult issue of how free will can co-exist within a theology constructed upon the existence of a supreme being that has foreknowledge of everything. Augustine’s response to this is to make the distinction between knowledge and causation. God’s foreknowledge of what will happen is not the same thing as causing what happens and, more to the point, the fact that God knows that man will sin and does nothing to stop him is precisely what gives him free will rather than making him a creature of pre-determination.
Twin Cities
Although it does not warrant mention in the title, there is another metaphorical city that is written about extensively in the volume that is variously known as the City of Man, the City of Earth, the City of the World and other variations depending on the translation. The two cities are placed in juxtaposition to each other both as metaphor and as historical accounting. For instance, Babylon becomes the symbol of the City of the World while Jerusalem is the symbol of the City of God. The difference is historically viable: Babylon was a pre-Christian civilization which fell due to earthly pursuits whereas Jerusalem is identified through scripture as the place where Christianity originated after the resurrection of Jesus.
The Nature of Evil
Another difficult question which arises from the tenets of Christianity becomes a thematic reconciliation within City of God. The question arises naturally: if God is benevolent why does he permit evil to exist? Augustine moves to reconcile this seeming paradox by positing that nothing which God creates can be inherently evil. Therefore when men commit acts which are determined to be evil, they are actually not committing naturally evil acts but are instead corrupting the goodness of any act through the manifestation of an evil will. The will to commit evil thus can be said to be a will to strip any act of its inherent good natured endowed by God. For Augustine, evil is not what exists in nature, but what exists through the processes of man after he has deprived the act of its good.
