![]() ![]() He endeavored to show that the Christian God, far from being blameworthy, is actually a source of solace and strength. Augustine wrote City of God in part to rebut this notion. Many Romans interpreted the sack as punishment for abandoning the traditional gods and goddesses in favor of the new state religion, Christianity. Not only a calamity for the city’s citizens, the attack was symbolic of a crumbling empire. The city’s walls had not been breached in eight hundred years. When the Visigoths, led by Alaric, sacked and plundered Rome, its citizens were deeply shocked and devastated. Up to that point, the Roman Empire had dominated Mediterranean civilization for nearly a thousand years. Completed by the year 426 (CE), City of God took Augustine at least a decade to write.Ĭity of God is, in at least some broad sense, a response to the trauma of the Visigoth attack on Rome in 410. The work covers, among other topics, theodicy, civil and natural theology, the history of creation, philosophy of history, eschatology, and martyrdom. Augustine’s City of God is arguably the first magnum opus of Christian philosophy. ![]()
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