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Saint AugustineThe City of God
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 426A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Books 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Book 4 Summary
Having pointed out the fact that Rome’s many disasters do not accord with the view that pagan gods were faithfully protecting the city, Augustine now answers a corollary question: What could account for Rome’s broad success in building a stable empire, despite those periodic disasters? He first critiques the question by pointing out that Rome’s imperial accomplishment is not necessarily morally good: “Is it reasonable, is it sensible, to boast of the extent and grandeur of empire, when you cannot show that men lived in happiness, as they passed their lives amid the horrors of war […]?” (138). Great empires typically serve merely for the collection and amplification of human vices, and without a moral center based on justice, they are little more than “gangs of criminals on a large scale” (139). The continual hunger to acquire more territories, Augustine suggests, is not a characteristic of moral human beings.
Augustine notes that Rome’s success is sometimes attributed to its chief god, Jupiter, but questions whether the portrayal of Jupiter is coherent. He cites many writers who associate Jupiter with a broad range of phenomena, identities, and names, and then suggests that it is both simpler and more reasonable to worship the one God who created and governs all things. He further notes the incoherence in the treatment of other pagan gods and goddesses. He questions what distinguishes Fortune from Felicity, or Virtue from Faith, if they are to be called goddesses. He wonders why, if Felicity really were a goddess—representing the true happiness that all humans desire—she would still not be the only god worth worshipping. Instead, pagan Romans simply lumped Felicity into an already crowded pantheon. Worshiping the one true God, Augustine suggests, is the better course, because he is the only one who can give true felicity.
Book 5 Summary
Augustine argues against the idea that world affairs, including the rise of Rome, were ordered by fortune or fate. Against astrological superstitions that the position of the stars guided human events, he makes a case for God’s sovereignty as the ordering principle in all things: “Without the slightest doubt, the kingdoms of men are established by divine providence” (179, emphasis added). He notes that if the stars’ alignment were the causal principle, then what results is a highly deterministic universe in which worship and prayer are rendered nonsensical.
Some Roman philosophers had also staked out a position against astrology’s determinism, suggesting instead that future events are not predetermined at all. For Augustine, however, that position is problematic because it suggests that not even God can know what will happen in the future, yet the Bible clearly teaches that God does know such things. Augustine thus wants to defend both a predetermined future and a sense of human free will that is not locked into a volition-denying determinism. He argues that God has foreknowledge, but that our own free actions are the proximate means by which those future events come about: “Our wills themselves are in the order of causes, which is, for God, fixed, and is contained in his foreknowledge, since human acts of will are the causes of human activities” (192, emphasis added). This position acknowledges God as the ultimate cause by which the proximate causes of our free wills operate, and that every link in the order of causes is fully foreknown by him.
Augustine then addresses how to explain Rome’s successes despite their worship of pagan gods. Since God is sovereign, he attributes Rome’s rise to God’s providence, who blessed the high moral qualities of the Roman republic (before the degradations he mentioned in earlier books had progressed too far). At the same time, he critiques the early Roman preoccupation with gaining glory, which, though useful, is a lesser quality than virtue. While the Romans gained earthly glory and praise for their empire, the Christians’ highest glory is to delight in God, and Augustine suggests that the purpose of Rome’s success was to give Christians an example of the way their pride and glory ought to be set upon the city of God. Augustine closes with a reflection on the Christian emperors of his own day, who represent both the Roman state and the city of God, and whose leading qualities are not only shaped by political utility, but by godly virtue.
Book 6 Summary
Augustine asserts the folly of worshiping many small gods when one could simply worship the supreme God. The real question at hand, Augustine contends, is which God can give not only temporal blessings but eternal life. To make his case, Augustine examines the theological writings of Marcus Terentius Varro, who includes a study of Roman polytheism in his voluminous works from the first century BCE. Varro addresses some of the difficulties in pagan belief and practice by separating Roman polytheism into three spheres: natural theology; mythical theology; and civil theology. Augustine, however, points out that the division does not address the fundamental problem, which is that none of the gods in any version of pagan theology appear capable of overcoming humanity’s greatest problem—death—and delivering eternal life to their followers. Further, he criticizes the sources of mythical theology, taking aim at the fables and theatrical plays about the gods: “If the tales are true, how degraded are the gods! If false, how degraded the worship!” (238). He suggests that, given the available evidence, Romans ought to consider whether their gods were perhaps merely demons all along.
Book 7 Summary
Augustine continues with Varro’s explanations of Roman polytheism, now taking issue with Varro’s attempt to narrow down the fundamental center of pagan worship to the 20 “select gods” of civil theology—Jupiter, Janus, Saturn, Mercury, and so on. Many inferior gods, Augustine notes, appear to undertake far more important duties than the select gods do, which undermines the artificial divisions Varro has introduced. Further, the names and attributes of the select gods themselves seem arbitrary. Jupiter, for instance, has collected an interminable list of associated names and titles for himself (Jupiter-Victor, Jupiter-Invictus, Jupiter-Pecunia, etc.), such that he represents an entire pantheon of attributes unto himself and appears to hold sway over areas that are supposed to be allocated to other major gods. Essentially, this means that polytheism ends up affirming monotheism as being the more commonsense position, “since Jupiter in himself is all gods” (270).
Augustine examines the major beliefs and rites concerning the select gods and finds them all either lacking in coherence or blasphemous in their ethics. He also takes aim against those who suggest nature-worship as the highest religion, asserting that it is folly to worship created things rather than the Creator. Augustine ends Book 7 with a summary of the Christian argument, namely, that worship is due to the one true God alone, not only for his merits as the Creator and supreme God, but also because he has provided eternal life for his followers through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, enabling humanity to “come to eternal rest and to the ineffable sweetness of the contemplation of God” (293).
Books 4-7 Analysis
The four books in the middle section of Part 1 show Augustine switching from a historical focus to a theological one in his argument against pagan religion. He views the identities and origins of many of the gods as logically incoherent, as expressed in Book 4, and views paganism’s ties to astrological superstition to be ultimately self-defeating. If, on the one hand, the gods are so capricious and degenerate as to be unpredictable in their responses, then human efforts like worship and prayer are unlikely to generate the desired results. On the other hand, if the stars’ alignment—rather than the gods’ whims—guides human affairs, then human efforts still do not matter, because everything that happened would be strictly predetermined.
Books 6 and 7 offer a good example of one of Augustine’s rhetorical strategies throughout the book: debating with literary sources that represent Roman civilization’s best arguments for its religion and philosophy. The earlier books also show evidence of Augustine’s wide-ranging use of classic sources, particularly in his treatment of Roman history, which draws on sources like Cicero, Virgil, and Livy. In Books 6 and 7, Augustine takes this rhetorical strategy one step further by selecting a renowned expert to be his debate partner: Varro, the highly-regarded Roman polymath of the first century BCE, whose works touch on almost every subject of philosophy and culture. When Augustine selects a debate partner in this manner, he accords lengthy sections to explaining and outlining his opponent’s beliefs before offering critiques that illuminate the contrast between the pagan and Christian positions. While Varro is Augustine’s most frequent debate partner in City of God, this rhetorical strategy is used multiple times, bringing in other literary opponents like Apuleius and Porphyry.
Books 4-7 are the high-water mark for Augustine’s theme of The Folly of Pagan Religion, though he will continue coming back to it throughout City of God. The sheer disorganized plurality of the Roman pantheon is, for Augustine, evidence against any claims that it might possess the truth. In many cases, his arguments simply point out what Augustine regards as the manifest absurdities of the way Roman paganism depicts its gods. Nevertheless, he still includes his own insights along the way, as in his contention that the cult of Jupiter itself appears to point the way toward monotheism.
The theme of God’s Sovereign Plan in History emerges once again, though it is not Augustine’s main concern in this section. He refers to this theme in Book 5, when his argument against astrology leads him into a reflection on the tensions between God’s foreknowledge and human free will. He argues for God’s sovereignty over all things but contends that this does not lead to a fatalistic determinism: God’s absolute foreknowledge includes each individual’s own free actions, which serve as proximate causes, thus preserving human volition within his sovereignty.
