The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Augustine of Hippo · De civitate Dei contra paganos, a work of prose in twenty-two books · written in Latin by Augustine as bishop of Hippo Regius and issued in instalments from about 413 to about 426, after the sack of Rome by Alaric’s Goths in August 410 · scored whole on Augustine’s Latin, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Latin quoted only where its words are certain, with Henry Bettenson’s translation for sense
Mode
Apology and polemic turned into a theology of history: refutation, philosophy, scriptural exegesis and antiquarian learning held in one argument
Mythos
Two cities, Jerusalem and Babylon, made the structure of all history; the first brothers, Cain who founds a city and Abel the pilgrim who founds none, repeated in Romulus and Remus; six ages of the world mapped onto the six days, and a seventh day of rest
Phase
The Latin West after the sack of Rome in August 410, written in instalments at Hippo Regius from about 413 to about 426, against senatorial pagans and against the triumphalism of a Christian empire
Presentation
Prose in twenty-two books: ten of refutation in two fives, twelve of construction in three fours (the origins, the course and the ends of the two cities), with a recapitulation at the head of each book
Register
A professor of rhetoric’s Latin in a bishop’s argument: antithesis and chiasmus at the summits, irony and sarcasm in the polemic, plain exposition and heaped citation between
Scale
From the angels before the world to the last judgement, with Assyria, Israel, Greece and Rome between, and the household, the state, the will and the resurrected body held in one plan
Governing Proposition
A bishop in Africa answers those who blamed the sack of Rome on the Christian God, and the answer grows, over thirteen years and twenty-two books, into an account of all history. Ten books take down the claim that the gods of Rome secure either this life or the next; twelve build in their place two cities, one made by the love of self and one by the love of God, mixed together in every age and parted only at the end. The wager is that a community is what it loves, and that a history of the world can be written from that one law, from the creation to the judgement.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In August 410 Alaric’s Goths sacked Rome, and those who still kept the old gods said that the city had fallen because the gods had been abandoned for Christ. Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius in Africa, began his answer within a few years and was still issuing it in instalments some thirteen years later. Its preface names the subject at once: “gloriosissimam civitatem Dei”, the most glorious city of God, set against another city, which seeks mastery over others and is itself mastered by its lust for mastery. The book is the history of those two cities.
The work is scored here whole, as Augustine finished it: De civitate Dei contra paganos, twenty-two books of Latin prose, the longest of his works. Its plan is his. Ten books refute, in two fives: the first five answer those who worship the gods for prosperity in this life, the next five those who worship them for the life after death. Twelve build, in three fours: the origins of the two cities (XI to XIV), their course in time (XV to XVIII), and their due ends (XIX to XXII). Each book opens by recalling where the argument stands. The Scripture quoted within it is in the Old Latin and Vulgate forms Augustine used.
The first book stays with the sack. The ironies are sharp: pagans who fled to Christian churches to be spared then blamed Christ for the city’s fall. The book turns to the women violated in the sack, and weighs Rome’s own exemplars, Lucretia, and Regulus going back to Carthage (I.15 and I.19). From the first, the particular events of 410 are held against the oldest stories Rome told about itself.
Movement II
Books II and III heap up the disasters Rome suffered before Christ, to show that the gods had not protected the city before. The point is made in the first chapters, and the catalogue runs on after it. Book IV turns to the gods themselves and mocks the crowd of minor deities that Roman piety assigned to every act, Cunina and the gods of the cradle and of the threshold. The mockery is comic, and it is part of the argument: the gods are absurd because they are loved wrongly.
In the middle of the mockery stands the most quoted sentence of the work: “Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?”
“Justice removed, then, what are kingdoms but great robber bands?” (IV.4). A pirate answers Alexander to his face. No state is just because it is a state; empire is robbery on a larger scale unless justice governs it.
Book V gives Rome its due and takes it away in the same movement. Rome’s glory was paid to it as wages for its virtues. Constantine and Theodosius are praised (V.25 to 26), but the praise does not make Christian Rome the city of God. Against the Eusebian reading of a Christian empire as the work of providence, the book desacralises Rome entire, pagan and Christian, and its fall proves nothing about God.
Movement III
The second five books answer those who worshipped the gods for the life to come. Book VI takes up Varro’s three theologies and finds in none of them the life to come. Books VIII to X turn to the Platonists and to Porphyry. Here the refutation ends and the building begins.
Book XI opens the origins of the two cities among the angels, before the world. Time is created with the world, not in it (XI.6). In the mind’s certainty of itself is found a trinity of being, knowing and loving: “si enim fallor, sum”, for if I am mistaken, I am (XI.26). Evil is not a nature but a privation, a falling away from the good (XII.7). Against the cycles of the philosophers, in which all things return, the work sets a line with a beginning and an end (XII.14 and following), and man is made so that there might be a beginning: “initium ut esset, creatus est homo” (XII.21).
Then the Fall, in Book XIV: the will turned toward itself, and the passions disordered after it, with shame and sexuality examined as its marks (XIV.16 to 24). The book ends on the sentence that holds the whole: “Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo”
“Two loves, then, have made two cities” (XIV.28). The earthly city is made by the love of self to the contempt of God, the heavenly by the love of God to the contempt of self. The critical title of this page is that sentence: every community after it is known by what it loves.
Movement IV
Book XV follows the two cities into time. The first brothers divide them: Cain founds a city, and Abel, who founds none, is a pilgrim (XV.1). The earthly pattern returns at Rome, whose founder Romulus killed his brother Remus (XV.5). The city of God in this age is peregrinans, a stranger in the world it uses, never at home in any visible state. Books XVI to XVIII trace its course through the genealogies of Scripture and set the chronologies of Assyria, Israel and Rome side by side, pausing over the monstrous races and the antipodes (XVI.8 to 9) and over the Sibyl’s acrostic (XVIII.23); they are the work’s longest walk between heights.
Book XIX begins the ends, and is the summit of the argument. Every good the philosophers proposed is walked through to its misery (XIX.4 to 8), and the best ordered civil life is shown from inside: the wise judge who must torture the innocent to find the guilty (XIX.6). The household has its peace and the father his rule; slavery is traced to its cause in sin (XIX.14 to 16).
Peace is defined as “tranquillitas ordinis”, the tranquillity of order (XIX.13), and even those who make war seek it (XIX.12). Cicero’s people is redefined as a multitude bound by agreement in the things it loves (XIX.24): the question asked of any people is what it loves. The two cities are mixed in this age, and no church or empire on earth can sort them.
Movement V
Book XX treats the judgement, and reads the millennium allegorically (XX.7 to 9), and that reading became the Western church’s. Book XXI turns to the punishment of the damned and argues that bodies can endure fire without being consumed, assembling the wonders of nature as witness: the salamander, lime, the salt of Agrigentum, and the flesh of a peacock Augustine kept at Carthage and found uncorrupted (XXI.4). The mass of the damned and the bodily fire are stated, not disclosed, and they close what the nineteenth book opened.
Book XXII gives the resurrection of the body, with a list of miracles at Hippo and Uzalis in Augustine’s own time (XXII.8), and ends in a vision. The six ages of the world run on the six days of creation to a seventh day of rest, and an eighth without evening. The last chapter climbs: “ibi vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et laudabimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine”
“There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold what will be in the end without end” (XXII.30). The book that began with the sack of a city ends with a city that will not fall.
The work has been read without a break since. Orosius wrote his history at Augustine’s request as a companion to the early books; Otto of Freising took its title and frame for his chronicle; Dante’s Monarchia argued against the political reading it fostered; Bossuet read it as a theology of history. In the twentieth century Löwith, Markus, Niebuhr and Milbank returned to it, and Hannah Arendt closed The Origins of Totalitarianism with its sentence on beginning. Rome, the empire it answered and the gods it mocked are gone, and the question of what a people loves is still asked of every state.
Act III · The Twelve
The plan is compelled: the refutation must clear the ground before the two cities can be built, and the twelve books run origin, course and end, as a history must. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the subtractive test, which finds much that could go without loss. Books II and III heap up Rome’s disasters before Christ in a catalogue whose point is made in its first chapters; Varro’s crowd of minor gods is rehearsed at a length the argument does not need; the genealogies and chronologies of Books XVI to XVIII run on, with the Sibyl’s acrostic (XVIII.23); there are the monstrous races and the antipodes (XVI.8 to 9), the wonders of Book XXI (XXI.4) and the miracle list of XXII.8. Each serves; few are required. Written over thirteen years, the work shows its accretion.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The work brings into the open a condition that can be stated and holds without its author’s faith: a community is constituted by what it loves, and is judged by that. “Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo”
“Two loves, then, have made two cities” (XIV.28). No polity is the seat of justice because it is a polity: “Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?”
“Justice removed, then, what are kingdoms but great robber bands?” (IV.4). Peace is “tranquillitas ordinis”, the tranquillity of order (XIX.13), sought even by those who make war (XIX.12); the people is a multitude bound by what it loves (XIX.24); the wise judge must torture the innocent (XIX.6). Charged: much is doctrine stated rather than disclosed, and some of it closes rather than opens.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The heights are real and recur. The preface sets “gloriosissimam civitatem Dei”, the most glorious city of God, against a city mastered by its own lust for mastery. Time is created with the world, not in it (XI.6); a trinity is found in being, knowing and loving, “si enim fallor, sum”, for if I am mistaken, I am (XI.26). The will turns toward itself in the Fall of Book XIV; the peace of Book XIX; and the last chapter’s ladder of rest, sight, love and praise (XXII.30). Charged: long stretches are flat by design, polemic, antiquarian and legal, and the mockery of the gods of the cradle is comic rather than elevated. A work that rises often across its length and walks between.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth built, and bearing the whole load. The two cities take their names from Scripture, but the work makes them the structure of all history: they begin among the angels before the world (Books XI and XII), divide in the first brothers, Cain who founds a city and Abel who founds none, a pilgrim (XV.1), and the earthly pattern returns in Romulus, who killed Remus (XV.5). The pilgrim city, peregrinans, is a stranger in the world it uses; the six ages run on the six days to a seventh of rest and an eighth without evening (XXII.30). The particular stays particular: Rome sacked in 410, Lucretia, Regulus going back to Carthage (I.15 and I.19). Held below the top because the foundations are found, in Scripture; the use of them as the frame of world history is Augustine’s building.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is double: the Christian apology of Tertullian and Lactantius with the Eusebian reading of a Christian empire as providence’s work; and the Roman histories and antiquities of Sallust, Livy, Varro and Cicero, which made Rome’s greatness the measure of its gods. The work turns from both. Rome, pagan or Christian, is desacralised: its glory was paid to it as wages for its virtues (Book V), and its fall proves nothing about God. Against the philosophers’ cycles it sets a line with a beginning and an end (XII.14 and following). An answer to a crisis becomes a theology of history, a cosmology and an eschatology. The stake was high: senatorial pagans to persuade and his own side’s triumphalism to refuse, as the West was failing. Charged: the form is the apologist’s and the encyclopaedist’s, extended.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The architecture is part of the knowledge: ten books that take down and twelve that build; origins, course and ends, so that the book moves as history moves, from the sack of a city in 410 to the city without end, and closes on the eighth day. Cast as a summa or a dialogue, it would lose its sense of a pilgrimage through time. But below the plan the form is loose. It is a treatise grown by instalment; whole books could change order or proportion without changing what the work knows, and the digressions show the container more than the instrument. Against a novel whose double plot is its knowledge, as in Anna Karenina, or Augustine’s own Confessions, whose form is its finding, this is a plan that carries an argument rather than a form that thinks.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Sixteen centuries of return without exhaustion, and the evidence is particular. It was read as political theology through the Middle Ages; as a theology of history by Otto of Freising and by Bossuet; on grace and the elect at the Reformation; and anew in the twentieth century, on history (Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, 1949), on the saeculum and the mixed cities (R. A. Markus, Saeculum, 1970), on political realism (Reinhold Niebuhr), on beginning and natality (Hannah Arendt, who closed The Origins of Totalitarianism with XII.21, “initium ut esset, creatus est homo”, that there might be a beginning, man was created), and against secular reason (John Milbank, 1990). Will, evil as privation (XII.7), time, shame (XIV.16 to 24), the state: they keep yielding. Charged: the yield is of a mind more than of a made thing.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is Latin prose of late antiquity, Christian apology and Roman history writing, and with them the thought of the West. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: history read as one story from creation to judgement, and the political order relativised by a society not of this world. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans written at Augustine’s request as a companion to its early books; Otto of Freising’s Chronicle of the Two Cities of the 1140s taking its title and frame; Dante’s Monarchia arguing against the political reading it fostered; the allegorical reading of the millennium (XX.7 to 9) that became the Western church’s; Bossuet, Löwith, Arendt, Markus, Niebuhr and Milbank. Held off the top because its reach on poetry and fiction is diffuse and shared with Scripture.
Score: 9.0 / 10
About sixteen hundred years, between the centuries and the millennia on the step. The text survives whole, in a heavy manuscript tradition copied without a break through the Middle Ages, and was printed among the first books of the Italian presses. It has outlived Rome, the order it answered and the paganism it fought. Presence is continuous but charged: the whole book is now read mainly in the academy and the seminary, and widely only in selections, the two loves of XIV.28, the nineteenth book, the robber bands of IV.4. Held at the head of the centuries and the foot of the millennia: below the texts read whole without a break for millennia, and above the works whose presence the academy alone keeps.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Augustine was a professor of rhetoric, and the great sentences show it: the antithesis and chiasmus of XIV.28; the climbing ladder of XXII.30; the ironies of Book I against the pagans who fled to Christian churches to be spared and then blamed Christ; the dialectic of XIX.4 to 8 that walks the reader through every good the philosophers proposed to its misery. The management of a twenty-two-book argument, with a recapitulation at the head of each book, is sure. Charged: the command does not hold across the length. The prose is often a vehicle, repetitive and swollen with citation; the polemic runs to sarcasm; the late books lose measure. The making bears the load in the summit passages and is serviceable elsewhere.
Score: 8.2 / 10
One law governs the whole: the order of loves. Take the two most distant elements, the jeering at the gods of the cradle and the threshold in Book IV, and the vision of rest in XXII.30. They obey the same law: the gods are mocked because they are loved wrongly, and the vision is the end of right love. The peacock and the salamander of Book XXI serve the argument that God’s power can hold bodies in fire; the antipodes of Book XVI are weighed by the unity of Adam’s race. The range runs from Roman antiquities to the angels, and the law holds. Charged: tensions stay open. Roman virtue is praised and dismissed (Book V); the earthly peace is both a good and a counterfeit; the mixed cities sit uneasily with the clean division at the end.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Nearly every order is held in one structure. Consciousness: the will, the passions and their disorder (Book XIV). The family: the peace of the household, the father’s rule, the slave and its cause in sin (XIX.14 to 16). The state: Rome and empire, justice, the people, war. History: from the creation to the judgement, with Assyria, Israel, Greece and Rome. The sacred: angels, God, the sacraments, the resurrection of the body. The natural order: creation, time, the wonders of nature, the monstrous races and the antipodes. They are integrated under the two loves, not listed. Held below the top because labour is present only as curse and use, and because the living particular is thinner than in the widest novels.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, then The Encompassed at 9.3, then The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0. A text whole for sixteen centuries and read without a break; nearly every order of human life, from the household to the angels, held under one principle; findings about the community made by its loves, the kingdom without justice and the peace that even war pursues, which hold without the faith they serve; and a reach on the thought of the West, from Orosius and Otto of Freising to Arendt, that is named and particular.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.4: the plan is compelled, but the catalogue of Rome’s disasters, the Varronian gods, the chronologies, the wonders of the twenty-first book and the miracle list could be cut without the argument losing anything it needs. Next above it, The Living Form at 7.9, a plan that carries an argument rather than a form that thinks, and The Sublime and The Made at 8.2, heights and great sentences reached often, with long flat and prolix stretches between.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Inner Law at 8.4, The Made at 8.2, The Living Form at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.4, below 7.5; every other axis clears it, the lowest of them The Living Form at 7.9, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.3. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.6, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the unmet cap would withhold the summit in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Augustine’s De civitate Dei contra paganos, scored whole as Augustine finished it: twenty-two books of Latin prose, written and issued in instalments from about 413 to about 426, after the sack of Rome in August 410, and planned by Augustine as ten books of refutation in two fives and twelve of construction in three fours. The work is complete and survives whole. References give book and chapter. Every axis is judged on the Latin; the Scripture quoted within it, in the Old Latin and Vulgate forms Augustine used, is part of the text, and faith is neither credited nor charged. The plan, the argument of each book and the principal passages are known closely; Books XVI to XVIII are known in outline and in a few chapters. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Latin is quoted only where its words are certain, with the page’s own close rendering. Translations · Henry Bettenson (Penguin, 1972), for sense; R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, 1998), as the closest modern rendering; Marcus Dods (1871), as the older standard. None is quoted, and no translation is charged to the work. Matters not verified or contested are not given: the standard modern edition, the length of the Latin and of the English, the date and place of the first printed edition, the age of the earliest manuscripts, Augustine’s own later accounts of the plan, and particular debts and early readers beyond those named.