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The Two Cities (Augustine)

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The Two Cities (Augustine)

Saint Augustine’s The City of God (De Civitate Dei, 413–426 AD) is among the most architecturally ambitious works in Western intellectual history. Written in response to the sack of Rome by Visigoths in 410 — which pagans attributed to Rome’s abandonment of its traditional gods in favor of Christianity — it offers the first sustained philosophy of history in the Western tradition: an attempt to explain the meaning of human events by situating them within a cosmic drama between two opposed communities, the City of God and the City of Man.

The Two Cities: Structure

The foundational distinction is not political or geographical but motivational. The two cities are defined by what their inhabitants love:

The City of Man (civitas terrena): built on love of self, love of earthly glory, love of domination. Its characteristic vices are pride, lust for power, and the reduction of all goods to temporal ones.

The City of God (civitas Dei): built on love of God, ordered love of self and others in reference to the divine. Its characteristic virtue is humility — the recognition that one’s goods are received rather than self-produced.

Augustine insists these two cities are not identical with the institutional Church and the Roman Empire. Both exist mixed together in history, and the lines of membership run through individuals’ hearts rather than through institutional affiliations.

Augustine’s Philosophy of History

The City of God is, as its translator Marcus Dods describes, “the first real effort to produce a philosophy of history”:

“He sees that human history and human destiny are not wholly identified with the history of any earthly power—not though it be as cosmopolitan as the empire of Rome. He demonstrates that the superior morality, the true doctrine, the heavenly origin of this city, ensure it success; and over against this, he depicts the silly or contradictory theorizings of the pagan philosophers, and the unhinged morals of the people.” — Marcus Dods, Introduction to The City of God

For Augustine, Roman history is not the story of Roman virtue and divine favor. It is the story of the earthly city’s characteristic pattern — acquisition, domination, pride, and eventual collapse. The sack of Rome is not a divine punishment for abandoning paganism; it is one more episode in the natural history of earthly cities, which are constitutionally incapable of providing the lasting peace they promise.

The Problem of Evil in History

Augustine’s treatment of suffering is among his most theologically sophisticated contributions. He addresses directly the claim that Christians who died in the sack of Rome were betrayed by their faith:

“For if every sin were now visited with manifest punishment, nothing would seem to be reserved for the final judgment; on the other hand, if no sin received now a plainly divine punishment, it would be concluded that there is no divine Providence at all.” — Augustine, The City of God

This is an argument for why suffering in this life cannot be read as straightforward divine judgment: if every sin were immediately punished and every virtue immediately rewarded, the structure of moral life would collapse. The final judgment would be redundant. God’s arrangement includes temporal suffering that cannot be decoded by human observers.

The famous mud-and-ointment passage applies this to the variability of response to shared suffering:

“In the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For, stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and ointment emits a fragrant odor.” — Augustine, The City of God

The external event is the same; the significance is entirely determined by the character of the person who experiences it. This is a striking anticipation of the Stoic claim (especially Marcus Aurelius’s) that events have no intrinsic positive or negative quality — only our judgments of them do.

The Equality of Death

One of Augustine’s most striking passages addresses the question of whether a long life is better than a short one:

“The end of life puts the longest life on a par with the shortest. For of two things which have alike ceased to be, the one is not better, the other worse—the one greater, the other less.” — Augustine, The City of God

This is an early Christian anticipation of the Stoic and Epicurean arguments about mortality. If the goal is living well rather than living long, duration is irrelevant. What matters is not how long one lives but “into what place death will usher them.”

Augustine is less interested in the Stoic cultivation of how to die than in the theological question of where death leads. But the surface claim — that length of life is morally irrelevant — is the same.

Purity of Soul vs. Purity of Body

Augustine addresses one of the most painful questions raised by the sack of Rome: the fate of Christian women who were raped by the conquering soldiers. He argues vigorously that bodily violation cannot corrupt the soul:

“While the will remains firm and unshaken, nothing that another person does with the body, or upon the body, is any fault of the person who suffers it, so long as he cannot escape it without sin.” — Augustine, The City of God

And further:

“If purity can be thus destroyed, then assuredly purity is no virtue of the soul; nor can it be numbered among those good things by which the life is made good, but among the good things of the body.” — Augustine, The City of God

This argument protects the dignity of victims by locating virtue in the soul rather than the body. It also challenges the shame culture that would hold raped women responsible for their violation. The application is pastoral — Augustine is responding to real women in his congregation — but the philosophical principle is general: the goodness of a person cannot be diminished by what is done to them without their consent.

The Limits of Earthly Politics

Augustine’s political theology is profoundly skeptical of earthly states. The City of Man can achieve a kind of earthly peace — the peace of order, which is the absence of violent chaos — but this peace is always provisional, always maintained by force, and always destined to end.

Augustine vs. Machiavelli

Machiavelli and Augustine are the two poles of Western political thought. For Augustine, political power is at best a useful arrangement of imperfect human beings whose deepest needs cannot be met politically. For Machiavelli, political power is the fundamental reality: the prince must understand, acquire, and maintain it, and ideals that interfere with this are luxuries. Machiavelli’s prince would find Augustine’s framework inert — it offers no guidance on how to win or hold power. Augustine’s response would be that winning and holding power is not the relevant goal; the relevant goal is preparing citizens for a city that no earthly power can build.

The Christian is therefore a pilgrim in the earthly city — participating in its structures where necessary, contributing to its peace where possible, but never identifying the earthly city’s goods with ultimate goods. This produces a characteristic double loyalty that secular authorities have always found uncomfortable: the citizen who obeys but does not worship, who serves but does not ultimately belong.

Historical Significance

Augustine was writing as Rome’s western empire was collapsing. His response was to relocate the center of history: not in the fortunes of Rome, but in the providential unfolding of a drama that Rome’s collapse is merely a footnote to. This reframing sustained Western Christianity through the centuries of barbarian kingdoms, and provided the intellectual architecture within which medieval Europe organized its political thought.

The distinction between sacred and secular authority that runs through medieval European history — the competition between popes and emperors, the separation of church and state, the concept of rights that even sovereigns cannot violate — is Augustinian in its deep structure, even when explicitly denied by its users.

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