City of God: Introduction

What Is a Society?

Human beings are essentially social, structured, personal (in God's image, Gen 1-2).
Human (dis)order characterizes old creation, and divine-human order new creation.

This age's orders include families, neighborhoods, tribes, tongues, cultures, economies, polities, trades, etc.
All bear powerful relationships with God, one another, and the rest of creation.

James Davison Hunter's categories for faithful social engagement:

Restoration ('defensive against'),
transformation ('relevance to'),
opposition (by prophetic witness) ('purity from'),
conservation ('Benedictine'), and
presence within.

Against/to/from/within what? What is a society's character? (Tim Keller, "Gospel and Life: City.")

Augustine: A society is characterized largely by its pursuits, which are mixed.
Being ends-oriented, societies are storied, tracing courses in narrative history.

Ends/teleologies orient a community or a person towards its future, and/or its past.

This is the setting for pilgrimage, our course's third key topic. (Cf. Robert Barron, The Strangest Way, 57-58.)

Several modes of Christian pilgrimage:

Back to some monument of faith for healing, refreshment, and orientation (the Holy Land, Santiago).
Through the way of Jesus Christ for remembrance and realization (liturgical year, QT, Fourteen Stations of the Cross).
Along some normative process for sanctification (labyrinth, Lent, Pilgrim's Progress).
Toward some frontier bearing the gospel of Jesus Christ (missions).
From an past through an inadequate present toward an envisioned future (Puritans).

All of these are potentially apostolic

in that they connect the Church's center and its expanding boundaries (but not necessarily accurately).
(Apostolicity discerns deep continuity with the Kingdom's original witnesses and its eschatological frontier.)

Two archetypes: 'The City of God' and 'The City of Man.'

Exercise: characterize, compare and contrast the following:
Revelation 18-21's two cities (compare Isaiah 24-27's two cities).

Augustine's Two (or Three) Cities
The City of Man:

Orders of disordered love, depleted by vice and insufficiently resourced by cardinal virtue.
(Sin, or concupiscence, is "wrongly directed love" or idolatry: Col 3:5, 1 John 5:21.)

The City of God:

An order of rightly ordered love, maintained by grace.
(The cosmos is a hierarchy of loves in which all creation should worship; Ps 19:1).

Both seek "peace in an organized community" (Brown 319).

But that's all the City of Man seeks: the glory of one's own local civilization.
Thus the one envies and misunderstands the other's transcendent joy.

Augustine's 'third city' is the temporal admixture of the two

(Cain/Abel's tense family),
available to Israel in the OT and now to societies with a Christian presence.
So 'faithful presence' and other models of engagement occur within the third city or "the world."

God's people are thus "on pilgrimage" as "pilgrim [dual] citizens" (Heb 13:12-14).

Both cities originate with the angels, then the creation of humanity. (What if that's misconstrued?)
They proceed to hell and heaven, respectively. (What if that too is misconstrued?)

An Excursus We'll Likely Skip: Israel
Israel's life was structured so others would see her peculiarity, and see uniquely in her life three gifts from God:

1. Jacob's tribes and God belong to each other.
2. Israel is given visible power and prominence: "Let nations serve you" (unknowingly).
3. Israel displays (alien) wisdom.

She does all these as both sign and countersign of God's reign (Isaiah 59), purposefully (Romans 11:28).
Jesus' work shifts Christian understanding of these gifts

from incorrect expectations to surprising fulfillments and corrected expectations (Romans 10:2-4).

Jesus' work also 'brings a sword' dividing 'Israel' into two (Isaiah 65:1-2 LXX in Romans 10:20-11:32).

Spirit-Israel bears all three gifts, refreshed;
flesh-Israel continues on her attempted path of righteousness.

Exercise: How are these rival visions of pilgrimage and our other key questions?

City of God Books 1-10: seeing through Rome's narrative
(see Gerard O'Daly, Augustine's City of God, A Reader's Guide, chs 6-9)
1-5: "Where were the gods?"

1: Occasion (sack of Rome) and overture introduce the work.
2: Roman religion is morally bankrupt and powerless, and the state's character vacuous.
3: Roman virtue and decline stem from alternate sources.
4: Imperial (gang) Rome arose by aggression, exploitation, religious manipulation regardless of justice.
5: Rome's power owed to God's generosity (not superstition or demonic 'gods'), and its goods are inferior to heaven's.

6-10: Pagan metaphysics and ethics

6: Civic religion is ineffectual and inextricable from mythology, poetry, and philosophy (so no privileging some over others).
7: The major gods personify created phenomena (or demons), missing their one Creator.
8: Platonism is superior to other philosophies and especially to paganisms, though it needs correcting.
9: Demons (and angels) are not intermediating beings between gods and humans; Christ is the true deifying intermediary.
10: The metaphysics of triune God (whom alone to worship), martyrs, angels, and demons corrects Porphyry's deficient metaphysics.

Books 11-22: explicating the Bible's true narrative
(see James J. O'Donnell, "Augustine, City of God")

11. The two cities have angelic origins, as allegorized through Genesis.
12. Earth's and humanity's creation reflect the metaphysics of good and its privations.
13. Humanity's willed fall brought the disorder of sin and (physical and spiritual) death, away from our intended end.
14. The two cities are founded on two loves: either of God/truth to contempt of self, or of self to contempt of God.
15. The cities proceed from Eden's fall to Noah's flood; Augustine attends to problems in the biblical texts.
16. Israel's history proceeds from the flood to the patriarchs; Augustine lingers on luminous figures and details and skims the centuries from Egypt through Solomon's reign.
17. Israel's ruin in the era of prophets from Samuel through Ezra demonstrates the human city's futility, and prophecies including David's psalms about God's city direct hope heavenward.
18. A recap traces both cities' intertwined courses under empires' domination to Christ's coming.
19. (See below.) Varro's 288 possible sects show the earthly city's division, war, and disintegration, whereas God's city brings longed for peace.
20. The cities come to their ends at Christ's last judgment:
21. Hell is the proper end of the city of self-love;
22. Heaven is the celestial end of the city of God-love.

City of God, Book 19, on the ends of the two cities
1-3: Up and down Varro's teleological decision tree.

These are (inadequate) ordinary philosophical proposals to explain the meaning of life. Gus will return to them later.

4: The book's thesis: The proper ends of human life lie beyond ordinary life, in hope.

(Yet this life of hope brings blessedness in the present, whereas focus on the present brings misery and emptiness (20). Cf. Matthew 6:31-34.)

5-10: Social life is a good, but worldly social life is a tribulation.

This includes even society with angels, demons, and other religions (9); saints are not exempt, facing demonic temptations (10).

11-16: Peace is the end of our good and a universal human desire,
and harmony a feature of the (presently disordered) order of being,

in which 19.14 belong both just human social hierarchies (familial and civic, 16)
and slavery (15), which is not human nature but either expression or accommodation for sin.
[Augustine claims people will not rule one another in eternity (16)!]

17 (a key chapter): The two cities thus share means but toward different ends.

The City of God's end lies beyond itself, in a transcending (27) peace.
Question: This works for secularism and paganism. What about, say, Buddhism?
The earthly city's disordered love subjects the heavenly city to captivity and alienation. It seeks to live harmoniously but must dissent from the earthly city's (pagan) religion and thereby become disagreeable, persecuted, missional
[and, when conditions allow, Constantinian?].
It must also struggle with its own imperfection (27).

18-19: The City of God is incompatible with some of Varro's categories and indifferent to others.

Knowledge by faith is limited but inimical to Varro's New Academy's sweeping uncertainty. (Cf. Elshtain on humility and Newbigin's Proper Confidence.) The heavenly city embraces active, contemplative, and composite pursuits and any compatible cultural forms of life. Nevertheless, faith does direct these pursuits and forms.

20-25: The earthly city's disordered love and refusal to serve God together prevents justice, true peoplehood (by Cicero's definition), and weal.

Discuss: What about a 'republic' with no established church, such as the USA?
Discuss: And does the disordered love in the corpus mixtum of the church compromise the body of Christ's peoplehood?
Its end is eternal separation (28).
Its (pagan) critiques of God and Christ are corrupt, contradictory, deceitful, or demonic (23). Yet their instances of praise of the God of the Hebrews should lead them to put away their idolatry.
If a people is defined by a common love, Rome is a (disordered and declining) republic with a kind of weal but no true justice (24).
Similarly, without worship of God, even so-called virtues are infected with pride and therefore vices (25).
Until these opposite ends are realized, the inferior peace of the earthly city/'third city' is still a blessing for both intermingled cities, and is to be desired and promoted (26; cf. Jeremiah 29).

We won't be discussing 'heaven' (i.e., new creation) much more this semester. Does that strip our relationship to the present from its proper eschatological context? Guess what I think! :)