413–427

Augustine, The City of God: the meaning of history, the two cities and the relation to the state

After the fall of Rome in 410 pagans blamed Christianity for the wrath of the gods, and Augustine replied with his most extensive apologetic work: Christianity does not guarantee temporal success – contrary, according to Lane, to Eusebius' hopes after Constantine's conversion – but gives inner peace and an eternal inheritance. The apologists, rejecting the Greek theory of cycles, turned to the idea of providence, but, according to Pelikan, it was "left" to Augustine to show that history moves toward a final goal. The two cities – of God and of the earth – are not the Church and the state but two groups of people marked by two loves: "love of God to the contempt of self" and "love of self to the contempt of God"; from the first fall to the final consummation they are intermingled, and the outcome is the condemnation of the first and the salvation of the second. Rome received power by God's will so that there would be peace for the spread of the Gospel, and fell because of its own sin; the heavenly Jerusalem has earthly manifestations, including the Church, but the visible Church is afflicted by sin, and the invisible Church consists only of the elect (Hall). Augustine's eschatology is mostly traditional, but he did not claim certainty about what is beyond understanding: he spoke vaguely and hesitantly of a fire in which the dead atone for sins, and understood the images of Scripture about retribution figuratively.