Danny Chai
As I mentioned, I recently finished St. Augustine’s City Of God. Lots of thoughts. St. Augustine is my favorite philosopher and City Of God is his masterwork, but it sat on my shelves for many years, as I found its massive length (1000+ pages) imposing. I finally decided to tackle it.
So honestly, a lot of it is tedious. Normally, Augustine’s digressions are my favorite parts, but here the digressions span hundreds of pages. The first section deals with an explanation of why the sack of Rome is not indicative of God letting His people down. And to prove that he goes through virtually all of Roman history, all of pagan thought, and a complete review of philosophy. The whole argument doesn’t feel relevant today; you honestly could skip the first 350 pages of the book and not lose much.
The second part deals more directly with the theme, the City Of God versus the City Of Man. But again, there’s some truly fascinating thought mixed in with overly thorough expository. He traces the idea from Genesis through Revelation, so the book feels in part his commentary on the entirety of Scripture. That’s a lot to cover, and it ends up being both long but shallow – the ideas fly by very quickly such that they’re hard to grasp. It’s only because I’ve read so many of his other works that I was able to really understand; I’m curious how people do without that.
But it’s still Augustine; I find his thought processes and ideas utterly fascinating. And encouraging – I came away feeling a deep thirst for the City Of God.
Some other assorted notes about the book:
There’s one section that resonated with me a lot. He talks about how there are three miraculous things about the Christian faith. One is that Jesus was raised from the dead. Two is that (even in his time) the Christian faith has spread throughout the world. And three is that that message was spread starting with unremarkable, uneducated fisherman. The second claim is incontrovertible, Christianity is everywhere. And if you don’t believe in miracles, given the third point, it’s even hard to understand how the second is even possible. Augustine notes, if miracles including the first didn’t happen, the existence of the Christian faith is yet a different miracle – ordinary people started and spread a faith that spread throughout the world with no supernatural power whatsoever. That’s a miracle.
This resonates with me because in honesty, a large part of my faith is circumstantial. Historically, it just makes sense to me that something remarkable happened 2000 years ago, there’s no other explanation for it to me other than that Jesus lived, died, and rose again. On a purely emotional level, I go through frequent periods where I feel like God is distant. On a social level, when I see the behavior of many professed Christians today it’s hard to believe in the church and feel like God is real. But the one thing I can’t quite shake is the fact of Jesus no matter how many issues with dryness or the church I have.
Speaking of which, Augustine applies the parable of the tares to the visible church, not the world in general. He believes there are many evil people within the church, those who aren’t a part of the true City of God, and we won’t know who they are until the final judgment.
Another interesting idea – Augustine discusses why God doesn’t answer all of our material prayers when He could. What he believes is that God does this so that we don’t worship for the wrong reasons – if we always got what we asked for from God, our faith would be based on getting what we want, not on God Himself. That tracks with me. It would be distractive, not focusing, if God gave us everything we asked Him for, if the ultimate point is God.
Augustine also spends a lot of time discussing translation difficulties, mainly the differences between the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) and the original Hebrew and how to make sense of them. One of his conclusions is that specifically for the Septuagint, the translation itself is inspired, and where it differs from the Hebrew it serves a purpose. I actually believe the same thing, not that every Bible translation is inspired, but specifically the Septuagint, that God guided it to be as it was as the basis of quotation for much of the New Testament.
Augustine also believes that hell is not all the same; there are levels of suffering commensurate with people’s behavior during their lives.
The most random things in the book: one is a discussion of how unnatural things point to the possible things God can do, and he discusses the case of a man who can make musical notes by farting. Lol. Another is near the end, when he has a discussion about, if a Christian is forced by circumstance to cannibalize another Christian, who the consumed flesh belongs to in the resurrection, whose body. That’s a topic I’ve definitely not seen discussed before.
That actually goes along with a broader theme. Augustine spends a ton of time arguing how the logistics of Christian theology is compatible with the science of the day. Like how cannibalism would work with the resurrection. Or how it was that Jesus’ physical body went to heaven – talks a lot about how to reconcile that with Aristotelian physics. What’s odd to me is that we have far more scientific knowledge compared to then, but oddly, we spend much less time worrying about the details of how that and theology work together, and I wonder why. My guess is that greater understanding of science has actually expanded our view of what’s possible so when we consider certain theological issues we’re more accepting that things can happen beyond our current understanding. Or could be something else. Regardless, it’s a little odd to me how in his time there apparently was much more arguing about the physical mechanics of Biblical ideas in a way that virtually never come up today.