Augustine - CITY OF GOD

THE CITY OF GOD Tuesdays, 4-6pm Pacific (7-9 Eastern)

he City of God, by the great 5th century Church Father Augustine of Hippo, is one of the greatest, most profound, and most influential works of the last two thousand years in Old Western Culture. The work began as a response to the pagan Romans who blamed the sack of Rome by the Vandals in 410 on the abandonment of the pagan gods due to Christianity. But it grew into a massive survey, first of the paganism of the pre-Christian Roman world and its failures, and then of the history of the entire world, pagan and Christian, from Creation to the Resurrection. Because of its sweeping scope and a perspective anchored in the Christian tradition, its philosophy of history was the dominant one in western Europe for well over a thousand years, until the so-called Enlightenment.

This course is a close read of the 22 books of the City of God. We'll begin by reading the Confessions, Augustine's spiritual autobiography, and then move into the great work itself. We'll focus on four things:

LITERATURE: we'll consider the structure of the work, how it moves through and builds its themes, and how Augustine uses his vast classical learning as reference points for his pagan audience.

CONTEXT: we'll talk about the Roman world of the pre-Christian and early Christian centuries, including its cosmology, philosophies, and current Christian heresies, and how the work should be understood against that backdrop.

DOCTRINE: We will discuss the doctrines Augustine assumes to be central to the Christian faith, with an eye to his profound influence on the development of later Western Christianity, and along the way we'll consider the role this influence played in the growing divide between Western and Eastern Christianity.

LEGACY: finally, we'll look at the influence, beyond doctrine and spiritual matters, that this work had on Western philosophy, politics, aesthetics, economics, jurisprudence, education, military ethics, and other social matters.

Course Objectives

I hope to help the students to be able to:

1. Grasp the overall structure or pattern of this massive and massively important work.
2. Recapitulate Augustine's basic arguments against paganism and for the Christian worldview and be apply to apply those arguments to modern anti-Christian thought.
3. Describe Augustine's influence on Western culture and thought forms in many areas, especially Christian doctrine.
4. Recount the philosophy of history that Augustine develops and support and/or critique it.
5. Understand Augustine's relationship to the rest of the body of early church fathers and how they viewed him.

Texts

• Augustine's Confessions, Penguin Classics, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (required translation)
• Augustine's City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (required translation)

Additional Resources (not required)

• Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. For those looking for more background on Augustine, the latest edition of Brown's work (published in 2000) is outstanding. Brown is one of the premier living authorities on Augustine, but his work should be supplemented with that of Henry Chadwick and Richard Southern.