City of God

About this work

The City of God in twenty-two books had its origin in painful questions about divine providence and protection in ‘Christian times’ after the sack of Rome in August 410 by Alaric and his Gothic army. The work as a whole is a defence of Christianity against pagan charges that abandonment of the old gods had brought celestial anger, so that the Church was responsible for the political and economic disasters. Augustine first demonstrates from Roman history that the cult of the gods had not brought prosperity, and from the Platonic philosophers that polytheism had not helped anyone to eternal life.

Henry Chadwick, “Augustine,” in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 337.