The City of God
In the summer of 410, the Visigoths sacked Rome. For the Roman world — including its Christians — this was not merely a military defeat. It felt like the unraveling of reality itself. Pagans blamed the Christians: Rome had abandoned its gods, and the gods had withdrawn their protection. Christians were shaken: if God protects his people, why did the eternal city fall?
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) spent the next thirteen years answering that question. The result was De Civitate Dei — The City of God — twenty-two books completed around 426 AD, the most ambitious work of theology produced in the ancient church. It is not easy reading. But its central argument is worth every page: Rome was never God’s city. No earthly city ever has been. And the city that is — the City of God — cannot be destroyed by Visigoths, emperors, or the passage of time.
The book’s core claim comes from Book XIV:
“Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord.” — Augustine, The City of God, XIV.28
Everything follows from this. The divide between the two cities is not political, ethnic, or even visibly ecclesiastical. It is a divide of loves.
Major Themes
The demolition of empire theology. The first ten books are a sustained polemic — patient, precise, and at times devastating — against the Roman religious imagination. Augustine does not concede the pagan premise. Rome’s gods never protected Rome; Rome’s rise was not divine favor but military ruthlessness and providential permission. The argument escalates to one of Augustine’s most quoted lines:
“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” — Augustine, The City of God, IV.4
What makes this more than polemic is where it lands: not in cynicism about earthly power, but in a refusal to grant earthly power any theological dignity it has not earned. States are not holy. Emperors are not sacred. The Christian is not a citizen of Rome in any ultimate sense — not even when Rome calls itself Christian.
History is linear, not cyclical. Against the dominant pagan view — that history endlessly repeats, that the cosmos rotates through eternal cycles — Augustine insists that history has a beginning, a shape, and an end. Creation, fall, incarnation, redemption, final judgment: this is the arc. Time moves. It moves somewhere. This idea, which now feels obvious to anyone shaped by Western thought, was not obvious in the ancient world. Augustine planted it.
The two cities are intermingled — and not where you expect. The City of God is not coextensive with the institutional church. The earthly city is not simply Rome or the state. Both cities are present wherever human beings are. Augustine’s consistent teaching — articulated across his works including City of God Book I — is that the visible church contains people whose ultimate love is themselves, while the world outside it contains people whose deepest orientation is toward God. No human institution — no denomination, no movement, no recovery — can claim to be the City of God. Citizens of that city are discernible only to God.
What the earthly city actually wants — and why it fails. Book XIX is the philosophical heart of the work. Every human society, Augustine argues, seeks peace — including Rome. The desire for peace is not wrong. What fails is every human city’s inability to achieve the peace it wants. Roman peace was built on conquest; it required domination to maintain it; it could be undone by a stronger army. The only peace that cannot be undone is the peace of the City of God — “the perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God.” This peace is not available to any earthly city on its own terms.
Political authority is real but limited. Augustine does not counsel withdrawal from political life. Government is a consequence of the fall — not the way things were meant to be, but genuinely useful in restraining what the fall unleashed. Christians can serve in government, obey civil authorities, and work for earthly justice — not because the earthly city is their home, but because they are pilgrims who care about the welfare of the city they pass through. The pilgrim prays for the city where she sojourns (Jer. 29:7). She does not mistake it for the city she is heading toward.
Where This Book Sits
Augustine was steeped in Plato — particularly the Neoplatonism he encountered before his conversion. The two-cities framework owes something to Plato’s distinction between the ideal city and its earthly imitation, though Augustine drives it in an entirely different direction: his two cities are not ideal and real, but are defined by love and will rather than by metaphysical status.
The City of God became the seedbed for a millennium and a half of Christian political thought. Thomas Aquinas drew on it. Martin Luther adapted the two-cities framework into his two-kingdoms doctrine — arguing that God rules the spiritual kingdom through gospel and the earthly kingdom through law and civil authority. John Calvin drew on Augustine’s political realism in framing his understanding of civil government. The Reformation’s recovery of Augustine against medieval papal misreadings of him (the church hierarchy ≠ the City of God) was one of the theological engines of the sixteenth century.
Brother Witness Lee referenced Augustine in a different context — citing Augustine’s analogy that trying to comprehend the Triune God is like using a small ladle to measure the ocean — in his ministry on conformation to Christ. There is no direct engagement with The City of God in the ministry of Brother Watchman Nee or Brother Witness Lee, whose concerns centered on inner life and church building rather than political theology.
Honest Assessment
The City of God is one of the handful of books that shaped the Christian West more than almost any other text outside Scripture. Its framework for thinking about history, empire, and the church’s identity within a hostile world has never been superseded.
It also has real limitations. The book is enormous — twenty-two books, roughly a thousand pages in modern editions — and uneven. Books 1–10, the anti-pagan apologetics, are demanding unless you know Roman religion and philosophy. Books 11–22, the constructive theology of the two cities, are richer and more directly applicable. Many readers are best served by beginning there.
Augustine’s doctrine of predestination runs through the work and has generated controversy in every century since. His argument that the City of God consists of the predestined elect — and that the earthly city consists of the reprobate — has been rejected, qualified, or reinterpreted by theologians across every tradition.
The book has also been persistently misread in the direction of theocracy: if the church represents the City of God on earth, then church authority over the state is theologically justified. This reading was Augustine’s opposite intention, and he argued against it directly. But the argument has been hard to prevent in institutional hands.
For Chinese Christians specifically: Augustine’s framework was shaped by a context in which Christianity was the religion of empire, and his political theology takes that establishment for granted in ways that do not map cleanly onto minority Christianity under a hostile state. The City of God gives the persecuted church a profound vocabulary for refusing to grant ultimate authority to the state — but its practical conclusions about Christian participation in government assumed a degree of access to power that Chinese Christians do not have.
Read This If…
Read this if you want a theological framework for understanding why no government — including the one persecuting you — gets the final word on history, and why the church’s failure or success is not measured by its cultural influence or state recognition.
It is not the place to start if you are new to Augustine. Begin with the Confessions. Come to The City of God when you are ready to think hard about history, politics, and the church’s true identity in a world that will never fully be its home.
The image Augustine ends with is the City of God on pilgrimage — making its way through the earthly city, using its goods, suffering its injustices, confessing its sins, and moving toward a peace that no empire has ever given and no empire can take away. That picture has sustained Christians under pressure for sixteen hundred years. It still does.