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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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

This chapter examines Augustine's writings on miracle through the lens of Franz Rosenzweig's postmodern retrieval of a premodern theory of miracle in Star of Redemption. The reading of Rosenzweig's enigmatic references to Augustine leads to a new and surprising conception of the signifying power of the miraculous in the early saint's writings. Through the dialogic coupling of Rosenzweig and Augustine, the chapter notes a certain temporal excess in the latter's City of God. It considers Augustine's often surprising emphasis on the corporeal, which corresponds to an experience of time itself as excessive. This chapter examines Augustine's writings on miracle through the lens of Franz Rosenzweig's postmodern retrieval of a premodern theory of miracle in Star of Redemption. The reading of Rosenzweig's enigmatic references to Augustine leads to a new and surprising conception of the signifying power of the miraculous in the early saint's writings. Through the dialogic coupling of Rosenzweig and Augustine, the chapter notes a certain temporal excess in the latter's City of God. It considers Augustine's often surprising emphasis on the corporeal, which corresponds to an experience of time itself as excessive.

This chapter analyses the early Salamanca theologian-jurists’ turn to Augustine of Hippo’s analysis of religion, empire, and laws amongst nations in his magnum opus The City of God (De civitate dei). The first section surveys the import of and access to Augustine’s City of God in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The second section interprets and assesses Augustine’s place in the early Salamanca School, according special attention to the writings of Francisco de Vitoria, Melchior Cano, and Domingo de Soto. The third section continues Soto’s fruitful project of relectio, rereading The City of God afresh with a focus on Augustine’s commentaries on right (ius) and law (lex) among nations under Rome’s imperial sway. The chapter’s conclusion argues that rereading The City of God in this way deepens our awareness of Augustine’s alliance with the Salamanca School, even as it highlights a certain tension between Augustine’s legal thought and Vitoria’s.

The Introduction orients the reader to the neighborhood of Flushing and presents the main themes and argument of the book in addition to relevant theoretical, historiographical, and methodological questions and a chapter outline. St. Augustine’s City of God is recycled in the title and Introduction to draw attention to religious pluralism as a theological, political and social issue, and a question that theologian John Courtney Murray, S.J., asked in 1960 is revisited as the central question of the book: How much pluralism, and what kinds of pluralism, can a pluralist society stand? While the book traces the often overlooked colonial history of Flushing to frame it within a discussion of religious freedom, the focus is primarily on Flushing since World War II and the Immigration Act of 1965—when it would become perhaps the most religiously diverse neighborhood in the history of the world.

In cantos ii-iii Spenser allegorizes the history of the heavenly City’s relationship with the visible institutions that have failed to accommodate it: Abessa’s flight represents the rejection of the gospel by the Synagogue; Una’s miserable night in the house of Corceca represents the fate of the redeemed in a superstitious pre-Reformation Church. Joined by Archimago, and attacked by Sans Loy, Una represents the abiding predicament of the redeemed. The allegory of Christ’s life (and death) on earth incorporates a quasi-prophetic allegory of the history of the Church under Henry VIII: the lion’s slaughter of Kirkrapine, for instance, alludes both to Christ’s expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple and to the dissolution of the monasteries.