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Augustine provides theological perspective on the body in his understanding of the body as both good and, under the condition of sin, disordered. Augustine's City of God provides a vision of the resurrection of the body as the psychosomatic ordering of the human being toward God. Augustine's vision offers an alternative to the disorder and brokenness of the body named in the first chapter.

This chapter puts Lactantius and Augustine side by side, compares their interests and preoccupations, and attempts to confront their contributions in certain key areas of Christian thought, in particular, ethics. It suggests that Augustine knew the Divine Institutes, perhaps as early as his Ciceronian phase, for Lactantius's prose was as Ciceronian as one could get outside the master's own corpus. Already in On True Religion, Augustine shows that he had read Divine Institutes closely enough, and recently enough, to have taken up its main theme — that religion and philosophy belong together under the banner of Christianity, that Christianity is the true religion and the true wisdom. In ethics Lactantius emerges as a serious and inventive theorist. He identifies the Final End as eternal life, and, more originally, redefines the classical virtues in Christian terms. Piety and devoted worship of the Christian God become a necessary condition of justice and the other virtues. These are precisely Augustine's views in City of God. In political theory there is a large gap between the two thinkers, which reflects above all the different contexts in which they lived and wrote.

This chapter considers God's own reconfigured eschatological Household, the church, by examining the third dichotomy raised in chapter 1: the public/private distinction. Reflecting on Augustine's City of God in conjunction with contemporary scholars John Milbank and Bernd Wannenwetsch, this chapter shows how the church is itself a politic that holds polis and oikos in tension. There can be no intelligible distinction made between the City of God and the Household of God given that the church is made to be Christ's body and is oriented to life in God. Christians are first members of this Household, and only secondarily members of smaller households, which are themselves formed in relation to the church.

When Descartes published his Meditations, the similarity of his arguments to some found in Augustine was immediately pointed out to him. The most frequently cited and most similar is Augustine’s claim that ‘If I doubt, I am’ (City of God 11.26). This chapter discusses this text in detail, and suggests that the relationship with Descartes is illuminating. It identifies three cogito-like arguments in On Free Choice, all of which act as starting points, involve revealing the self-evidence of certain undeniable truths, include an analysis of what is to know something, and incorporate an idea of value.

This chapter discusses the extent to which Eusebius’ Christian politics of theocracy and Augustine’s rejection both of pagan political theory and of Christian theocracy (in the City of God) may relate as Christian reactions to the political philosophy reconstructed in Parts II and III of this book.

The edition of Augustine’s City of God by the Spanish-born humanist Juan Luis Vives (first published in 1522) is one of most successful pieces of patristic scholarship of the sixteenth century. Produced just before the explosive escalation of the Reformation, it remained the key version of the text for over a hundred years. This article analyses the presentation of patristic knowledge in Vives’ commentary to explore how the confessional conflicts affected patristic scholarship. It argues that Vives’ work survived the confessional pressures relatively unscathed because it made Augustine’s work manageable and accessible across confessional parties. In doing so it seeks to highlight the importance of confessional silence in the Republic of Letters as a strategy to confront the pressures of confessionalisation.

This chapter investigates Augustine's role in addressing the Problem of Paganism. After the Sack of Rome in 410 CE, Augustine set out to produce his most ambitious work, a Christian rethinking, not just of the history of Rome, but of the relationship between God and the course of human history. Written in the safety of North Africa, the City of God (CG), begun probably in 412 but not finished until about fourteen years later, is both an intellectual masterpiece and a foundational book for the Problem of Paganism. Although the problem has somewhat different contours for him from those it would take on in the Middle Ages, in the City of God and other works Augustine looks closely at three of the main strands of the problem — wisdom, salvation, and virtue — and takes positions which set the agenda for almost all subsequent discussion.

In AD 410 when Rome fell to the Goths, a crisis understanding was brought about that took on various questions that have been buried in antique thought. Pagan civilization and tradition proliferated in Rome, and the life-source of the Empire remained in the ancient religions. However, the rise of Christianity may have caused a significant effect towards its demise, at least until Alaric and the Arian Goths took over. As this chapter looks into some of the aspects of the fall of Rome, it attempts to examine how Augustine was able to initiate the City of God in 413. It shows that the plan and structure for this work is rooted on Christian tradition and it presents two groups of men, cities, or societies. It attempts to provide a thorough examination of the content of the various books of this work particularly in the context of the refutation of paganism, the source of his ideas, and other such aspects.

In assessing the reading which went into Ruotger's creation of his image of Bruno, the Bible (including St Paul), the classics, the Rule of St Benedict, and the early Christian poets and hagiographers have all been given full value by scholars; but the Christian Latin fathers, or more particularly Augustine and Pope Gregory the Great, have been underrated. This chapter explores the influence of Augustine and Gregory on Ruotger's work. Ruotger was significantly influenced at least by Augustine's Christian Doctrine and City of God, and even more by Gregory the Great's Letters and Pastoral Care.

In the City of God, Augustine of Hippo claims that Christians and pagans form two societies identified by their different shared objects of love. The Christian community distinguishes itself from the pagan world by its different aims and goals. One clear and important strand in Augustine's thought presents a sharp antagonism between the Christian and the Greek outlook. However, it would be one-sided to attend only to this strand and to ignore the views that place Augustine firmly in the Greek tradition. Augustine does not believe, then, that he undermines the practice of the virtues, as pagan moralists understand them; he seeks to remove the obstacles imposed by human sin, and especially by human arrogance, to the practice of the virtues. Augustine agrees with this conception of the virtues, and claims that we are in a better position to practise them if we recognize our dependence on God for our growth in virtue, and the insufficiency of the goods of this world for our complete happiness.

This introductory chapter analyses the fourteenth book of The City of God against the Pagans (c. fifth century CE) by Augustine of Hippo. Book 14 contains the analysis of Adam and Eve's life in the Garden of Eden and their subsequent Fall. This is an episode central not only to his theological project, in that Augustine single-handedly created the doctrine of original sin that dominated the thinking of the Church for so long, but also to his political theory, because it provides the setting for the central categories of the work's overall argument. More importantly, the chapters in book 14 contain by far the most sustained rumination on Stoic philosophy to be found in the entire work.

This chapter investigates another neglected work by Donne: Biathanatos, his treatise on suicide (composed c. 1608; published 1647). Donne's engagement with Augustine focuses on the City of God; however, unlike the Essayes in Divinity, which closely emulate Augustinian models of interpretation, Biathanatos approaches Augustine's text in an openly hostile and oppositional manner. Donne's citations from the City of God deliberately misrepresent and distort Augustine's position on suicide, in an attempt to interrogate the rhetorical foundations which underpin Augustine's moral and theological thought. Augustine's ethics focuses not on the quality or outcome of an action, but on the motives of the agent; this emphasis on intent survives in the early modern discourse of casuistry (the art of case-based reasoning), of which Biathanatos is an example. Donne's treatise puts particular pressure on ‘charity’, the key concept of Augustine's intent-based ethics, and problematizes principles of discretion and good judgement which will come to define his preaching.

This chapter provides the text and translation of Book X of St. Augustine's The City of God. It discusses how Christ offers himself as both celebrant and sacrifice and how the holy angels of Christianity demand worship not for themselves but for the one true God. It also mentions the miracles enacted by the angels to liberate the Israelites from the tyranny of the Egyptian Pharaoh and to safeguard their journey to the promised land, which is proof of God's design for the emergence of his chosen race. The chapter introduces the fraudulent practices of the theurgists, which was described by Porphyry, who is considered the spokesman for Platonism. It records Augustine's disgust at the theurgists' claim to persuade their deities to grant the purification of human souls, or on occasion even to obstruct it.

This chapter compares the ideas Evagrius of Pontus held about angels to those of Augustine of Hippo. Evagrius cultivated a detailed program of Christian advancement during the end of the fourth century, and in that program, angels were considered rational beings, who sought to help Christians advance by protecting and developing their intellectual faculties. Like the human beings they helped, angels were ultimately going to gain union with God. Augustine of Hippo created an understanding of Christian history that included a different portrait of angels, as beings whose status and moral nature were fixed at the beginning of creation. The purpose of the chapter is to show the significant difference in the way these two Christian thinkers incorporated angels into their conceptions of the Christian world and the lives of Christians.

This chapter provides the text and translation of Book XI of St. Augustine's The City of God. It highlights how Augustine argued against those who follow Aristotle in maintaining that the universe has always existed and against the followers of Plato who admitted that the universe was created, but in the remote mists of eternity. It also considers the levels of creation, wherein angels are naturally higher than men, but by the law of righteousness (iustitia) good men rank above wicked angels. The chapter covers the conflict between the goodness of nature and the malice of will. God's unchangeable knowledge of the future foresaw the division between light and darkness, as well as the good which was to accrue from the light.

In Saint Augustine's texts, bodies consistently evade wholeness, produce excess, affirm, and negate—and approach a God who likewise does all of these things. City of God describes several modes of what we might call corporeal excess—and in so doing, not only tends to textual versions but also pushes into the conceptual excess of paradox. His is a queer apophasis, then—an apophasis of confession, not least. In confession, there is always more to say—and to unsay. One never gets to the bottom of it all, for no utterance is ever quite right. The self eludes language as surely as God does. The fragmentation, the break not only between intention and expression but also between human and divine in the fallen world, produces excess, not merely by adding on lies to the truth, but by keeping us talking (perhaps fictively) toward a God our words can never reach: there is always more to say.

This chapter examines the narrative, genre, setting, and characters of City of God (2002). Before looking at the process of narration in City of God, it outlines the framework of narrative as defined by various theorists. The film can be used to illustrate the difference between narration (the act and process of telling the story) and the narrative (what is actually recounted). City of God uses the components of storytelling in a complex way, manipulating the timeframe and utilising a single narrator to lead the audience through the film. It can be seen as reworking themes using genre devices also made familiar to a Brazilian audience though their consumption of Hollywood films in cinemas and on TV. Ultimately, the relationship of the film to real life, real people, and real places stresses authenticity.

This chapter provides the text and translation of Book XII of St. Augustine's The City of God, which resumes the discussion of the Creation and focuses on refuting standard objections to the Christian tradition. The natural goodness of all creation merits praise, and the reason why the good angels enjoy blessedness while the wicked angels experience misery lies in their varying attitudes to that praise. It seeks the possible reason for the perverse will that led to the secession of the wicked angels. It also mentions how Augustine first rejects the belief that the human race has always existed, citing the Platonist Apuleius as the spokesman for the mistaken belief. The chapter addresses questions about how God promised the gift of everlasting life before time began and how the theory of periodic cycles square with God's unchanging purpose.

Henceforth Una represents Augustine’s City of God. As such, she stands for a Church that is distinct from the “visible” earthly institutions that co-exist with it. She is not (as most commentators have thought) the Church of England. Correctly interpreted, the Kirkrapine episode underlines Spenser’s preoccupation with the invisibility of the Church. The physical elusiveness of the House of Holiness also tends to distinguish the Church proper from church buildings and forms generally.