City of God (Penguin Classics) by Saint Augustine Read Free Book Online Page A

salvation. Those who are still alive are on the ‘way’ to the fatherland; they are in the harbour whence they may pass to the fatherland itself. Here we see the persistence of Augustine’s earlier ideas on man’s destiny.
     
    And what of the role of the Church in the
City of God
? In a very general way Augustine identifies the Church with the city of God on pilgrimage here below. Thus he speaks of the ‘City of God, that is to say, God’s Church’ ( Bk XIII, 16 ). But there were serious reservations. First there were citizens of the city of God on earth before the Church was founded, as we have seen in the case of the Sibyl. The Hebrews foreshadowed the city of God and gave it members. The Gospel parables of the cockle among the good seed, the separation of the wheat from the chaff, and the mixed collection of fish in the net, led Augustine to conclude that many existing Church members would not be found to be members of the city of God. Similarly there were some who never belonged to the Church who would be found to be members of that city.
     
    The
City of God
is formally neither a philosophical nor a theological treatise though it is mainly theological, since it deals with man’s salvation and happiness as related to the worship not of many gods but of the one true God and uses the Bible as its supreme authority. Nevertheless it treats of formal philosophical and theological matters
passim
.
     
    Augustine’s general philosophical viewpoint is Platonic ( Bk VIII, 6–9 and Bk XI, 25). He accepts the traditional Platonic division of philosophy into physics, logic and ethics – in which he sees a vestige of the Trinity – but transforms it into a Theodicy in which God, ‘the cause of existence, the principle of reason and the rule of life’ ( Bk VIII, 4 ), is the explanation of all.
     
    His practical approach to physics, however, requires some explanation. Pierre Duhem judged that of all the Fathers of the Church Augustine alone did not disdain the doctrines of profane science. Galileo commended his ‘circumspection’ in the matter. Augustine depended for his scientific information on the works of Varro, Cicero, Pliny, Posidonius, Apuleius and the Neoplatonists. He seems to have a special acquaintance with mathematics, astronomy and medicine. 8 When there appeared to be a clear conflict between what he took to be the historical account of the Bible and an ascertained fact of rational science, he accepted the fact of science and understood the Bible allegorically. He was embarrassed by some fellow Christians:
     
It happens often that a non-Christian too has a view about the earth, the heaven, the other elements of this world, the movement and revolution or even the size and distances of the stars… the natures of animals, plants, stones and such things which he derives from ineluctible reason and experience. It is too shameful and damaging and greatly to be avoided that such a one should hear a Christian talk such utter nonsense about such things, purporting to speak in accordance with Christian writings (
de Genesi ad litcram
1, XIX, 39).
     
    On the other hand no mere
hypothesis
of science was accepted by him in preference to an account in the Bible. He believed that one could also follow the Bible as an historical account:
Now in my opinion it is certainly a complete mistake to suppose that no narrative of events in this type of literature (i.e. the Bible) has any significance beyond the purely historical record; but it is equally rash to maintain that every single statement in those books is a complex of allegorical meanings ( Bk XVII, 4 ).
     
    The flood of Eastern religions into the West and the mainly spiritualist character of the dominant Neoplatonist philosophy – not to say the theurgic beliefs and practices associated with Porphyry and, especially, Iamblichus and others – had a markedly regressive effect in relation to scientific matters which Christians, including Augustine, shared with their