 Welcome to The Spiritual Masters, a podcast from Tan Books and Tan Direction in which we look at the greatest and holiest writers from Catholic history. Join us as we explore the life and times in which they lived, an overview and study of their greatest works, and how we as Catholics can look to these masters as models for our own holiness on our journey to heaven. Alright, welcome back to another episode in this Spiritual Masters series, and our two guests are Saint Augustine of Hippo, and we've had a number of excellent conversations about him, his biography, his great work, the confessions, and today we're talking about the City of God, and we have Dr. Paul Thickpen to kind of guide us through these discussions. So thanks again, Paul, for being here. It's been great so far. Thanks for the invitation. I love it. The City of God is a massive, massive work. It intimidates me. I have a big, fat edition here that I've kind of tried to pick through. But one thing I think maybe an interesting way to kind of kick off the conversation is the actual title is not just the City of God. It's the City of God against the pagans, which kind of sets the historical tone and the framework in which this book arises. So why don't you kind of paint the picture for us of when in history this is landing and why it played such a pivotal role in the history of Catholic theology? Well, it was in 410 that a major event happened for anyone who was associated with the Roman Empire in any way, and that was the fall of Rome, the siege and sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths. So barbarian peoples that can't really say they were totally outside of the Roman Empire they have been in, the Roman Empire they've been mercenaries. And we've mentioned in the earlier episode how St. Augustine was a restless man. He was restless, so we're restless till we rest in God. But there was a lot of restlessness going on in the Roman Empire at this time. And so you had the restlessness of all kinds of political officials being taken down and put back up and almost tribal kind of attitudes, especially in North Africa, but in Rome as well, that the whole empire seemed to be kind of restless at this time. And because of that unstable, uncertain, scary for people who are used to having this empire, it's kind of the anchor in their lives in a certain way. It's like a friend who grew up in Tacoma, Washington, he talked about how Mount Rainier, wherever you went out, when you went outside, it was there and it was always there was a mountain, it was always going to be there. And how unsettled he was when he moved to New Haven, we went to Yale together in Connecticut. And the mountain wasn't there when you would go out. And I think it's like this for a lot of the Roman people, the people of the empire, wherever they were, whether it's in Italy or in North Africa or wherever, that the Roman Empire had always seemed like a mountain there that is immovable, was not going to change, not going to move. And then it did in this way. And so you have the sack of Rome and it wasn't just they came in and stole all the stuff. I mean, they pillaged and they raped and, you know, stories of, of, of convents, of Christian sisters raped and so you had refugees from Rome scattering all over the empire, but some of them did actually go down to Hippo and including some, some well-known ones. And when they came, they had questions. They had basically because, you know, Constantine made the empire officially Christian. Some people thinking, okay, surely God would not let the empire fall, the empire fall apart because it's, it's Christian now. And then we've kind of got on our side, but then this happened. And so it threatens their faith. It upsets not just them culturally and mostly, but their faith is now, what do we do? This thing we thought was going to be here forever. I find the attitude, I found the attitude before, you know, amongst some Americans that we've, we've kind of been a Christian company. I mean, people are going to debate whether a Christian country or not. But anyway, a country that has been known for its, its Christian faith and for sending missionaries to the world and for its charitable works and all those things. And some people would say, well, yeah, you know, God wouldn't let America fall. And yet, you know, it could happen. And you read a book like this and you realize it. So the point is with the siege and then the sack of Rome and the scattering of those people, some of whom ended up in Hippo, you had lots of folks asking if they were Christian, why did God let this happen? But there were still lots of pagans around the ancient Roman pagan faith. And they believed that the pagan gods had been the defenders of Rome. And that's why Rome had been so powerful and strong and reliable all this time. But now Rome seemed to be forsaking the pagan gods and adopting this Christian God and look what happens. So for them, it was an argument that the Christian God was false and that the people should return to the worship of the pagan gods. And Augustine made a very big point of that, the early part of the book. He's talking about the pagan religions and the pagan philosophy of ancient Rome. And he wants to make a very big point. No, the fall of Rome was not because of Christianity. But he does say that more ancient Romans did have a sense of virtue. There were certain types of virtues, albeit imperfect, but there were great virtues back then. And that I think with the continual rise of the Roman Empire and I guess the materialism and the corruption, they lost those virtues that they had once had. And so he blames the fall of Rome to a certain extent on the lack of virtue in the Roman Empire along with divine providence and divine punishment. But it was also just the old school kind of understanding of Roman virtue and they had lost that. So I kind of find that interesting that he wasn't just looking at the ancient Romans and say they're all bad because they're all pagans. Not at all. Not at all. He had an appreciation for pre-Christian virtue. But that's why it was written against the pagans. Now the whole book we should point out is not that argument against the pagans. It starts out the first few number of pages, does look at Roman culture and does his analysis of how he thinks Roman history and Roman culture shows that it was doing itself. Yeah, the decadence, the pride. And you know, this is interesting. I think like political corruption. I read something once that said right before the Roman Empire fell, a certain amount of the wealth in the entire Roman Empire had concentrated within a certain geography around Rome. And once it reached a certain tipping point, some percentage of the entire wealth of the Roman Empire was within X amount of miles from Rome. So it had been concentrated to a centralized government, essentially. And then they found that once it reached that, it fell because the strength of it being widely dispersed was gone. And centralization usually does not work very well. Well, the same guy took a study of the concentrated wealth around Washington, D.C. And it was, yeah, and it's the lobbyists and big business and the financial sector. And he showed the amount of wealth surrounding Washington, D.C. geographically, like people living in that area. It had it passed that same percentage point that had happened with Rome. So it's an interesting metric to see, are we going to have our own fall? And it was just a fascinating thing. So I think, you know, I think Augustine, especially because he lived in that secular world, and he was a powerful guy before he was a Christian, he was a well respected person. He had considered a political life. He was well attuned to these political and economic dynamics. It wasn't just a theologian commenting on bad people. Right. You know, so I think he had a very holistic sense, but he did see that the virtues of the ancient Romans had been lost to this decadence and materialism, and it made them weak. So it starts out as an apologetics for, you know, for Christians, but also for virtue of apologetics for virtue. But as you're reading, you realize it's going to be something much, much more. Yeah. So it kind of leaves that and it starts going into the two cities, you know, and you have the city of God and you have the city of man. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about just that paradigm? And then I'll read a quote that he provides, you know, that kind of illustrates that. But you know, what are those two cities? You know, Thomas Merton, who wrote an introduction that I read that I like very much. He said that the Confessions is Augustine's autobiography. The city of God is the autobiography of the Catholic Church. That's an interesting way to look at it. And it's he ends up trying to look at the whole span of human history. And to answer questions once again about evil, the presence of evil and corruption and the cycle of corruption, fall and rise. And to do that, his theology of history is that there are two cities that are going on here. And one of them is the city of God. And one is the city of man. And they are both organized, as he would put it, the principle of the organization is love. That the city of God is organized according to love of God. The city of man is organized according to love of man or self. And that that makes all the difference in their, the episodes and the history of those two in their conflict and sometimes their cooperation. But for him, that's the paradigm that explains what you see when you look at history. I just want to read that passage. There's a certain key words that I want to zoom in on. He says, accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves and you, you bid paraphrase this, the earthly city, the earthly city by the love of self, even to the contempt of God and the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. So he's not saying that if you love man, then you contempt God, but or that if you love God, you have contempt for yourself. But even to that, if it's required, if you have to go that far, if you have to love God, if you have to have contempt for yourself, then you have to have contempt for yourself because you need to do anything for the sake of loving God. And the people who are the residents, the citizenry of the city of man, they might say that they love God. They might think they do in some way. But when the going gets tough, they will love themselves even at the risk, even at the expense of having contempt for God. So it's that, I just find that contempt part, even to that portion, that part that you might have to go all the way to have your kingdom. But the martyrs did. I love God so much. I'll let my whole life go. I'll lose my whole life. I love, it shows one of the keys through, I think that understanding Augustine all the way through is the notion of disordered love, that we tend to think of just terms of love and hate or that kind of thing as opposites. But he says that most of the sin and what goes wrong in the world is actually because of love, but it's a disordered love, that it's right for us to love the better things more than we love the lesser things, the things that aren't as good. And that there are higher goods in the world and that God is the highest good. And after that, on the earth, it's human beings. And so what happens here and in so many situations, he says it's that people are getting their loves disordered. They're out of priority. They're loving something lower than God, more than God. And he's the highest. We should love him the most. We talk about, I think it was Louis. You're a Louis expert, you would know. But first things and second things, first loves and second loves really. And if you treat a second love like you should treat a first love, it not only does not get the love that it should as a first love, but it doesn't even get what it deserves as a second love. And the analogy I use for that when I'm talking to people is my relationship with my wife has to be first. That's primary. I have to love her first, first being a weird word, but... And then second is my love for my children. If I place my children above my wife, then they're not even going to get what they deserve as my children. So it's kind of an analogy, but I think that's Augustine had this wonderful sense of just what you're saying. We love so many things. It's the disordered arrangement, the sequence of these things that's where we get into trouble. Because it's out of keeping with reality. This is the greater good. Therefore, it deserves, it merits, it is only right and just to love that thing most. And that's God. If you love the other things, then you lose it all. Yeah. Do you have some passages for us? I saw you had your book kind of taken out. So many, so many. I mean, it's a huge book. I know, I know. But you flagged some special passages for us. So I just love this passage where he compares kingdoms to bands of robbers, thieves. If justice is taken away, then what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? Like a kingdom, the robber's band is made of human beings, ruled by the authority of a leader, knit together by a pact of confederacy, and the booty is divided by the law they have agreed upon. If by the admittance of more outlaws into the band, this evil increases to such a degree that it seizes territories, establishes a capital, takes possession of cities, and subdues people. It takes on the explicit title of kingdom, for that is now clearly what it has become. But this is not because the robbers are any less greedy. It is simply because the law now gives sanction to their greed. These days, the taxation and other kinds of things, the foolishness of our government makes me think about that again and again. He had it pegged back then. I think one of the things that, and we can't go through all of the city of God, it's so vast, but to give a sense of, he's telling the story of mankind. After he talks about pagan and pagan philosophers, he goes back to Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, and he works all the way through. He hits like many of the major biblical stories, but his point is showing kind of God's providence, the story of salvation unfolding throughout all of time. Just like in the confessions it folds out in his life. It's kind of a microcosm of the church unfolding, and it's still unfolding. Talk to us about that, his very strong sense of divine providence and all of history being guided by the hand of God. Well, once he puts in place this paradigm, this overriding reality for us to see, then everything else begins to fall into place. We see that starting with a fall and you trace through, whether it's Cain, or whether it's Esau, or one of the others, that the city of God and the city of man are at loggerheads, and it unfolds into something beautiful. Of course, God's providence, he says in the beginning that the seat of the woman will crush the serpent's head. That's the proto-Evangelia and the proto-gospel, and it unfolds that in the life of Christ, but then beyond that also in the life of the church, because he understood the church so deeply, valued it so deeply as the body of Christ, the working out of the life of Christ in the world. And so, it's full of hope at the end, and that's what a lot of the readers needed at that point. The world was falling around him, it seemed like, and he ends with kind of the same kind of vision that John has in the apocalypse, that the end is the city of God that will last forever. And these two cities, you know, as we're talking about this this providential hand, this unfolding of history starting at the beginning and going all the way through, it ends in each city has its own ending and the last judgment, and he finishes off part two of the great work and explaining that one city has eternal punishment as its end, and the other city has eternal happiness and the resurrection of the body, and he has quite a lot to say about the resurrection of the body, but that's the end. And so, we know, even in 2023, we know how all this is going to play out, but Augustin had a very clear sense of this all the way back in 400 and whenever he wrote it, but it's a beautiful story. It really is. I can see going back to how you open this, you know, how this is sort of the autobiography of the Catholic Church. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. So, with that, you know, I think we're going to, in our subsequent episodes, we're going to be talking about the heresies that Augustin had to fight and we're going to talk about more of his works, but the city of God was and, you know, he was faced throughout his entire life with so many different heresies he had to battle, Manichaeism, Donatism, Pelagianism, and others. And so, I know that he wrote City of God when he was kind of an older man and it was kind of a, you know, I guess his Magnus Opus in a way and he had so much life experience poured into this, you know. So, it's and I heard somebody once say, you know, read it, but don't feel like you have to get bogged down in all the historical details. Just skip it. Just skip stuff, but you can gut this book and keep flipping to the sections that resonate most with you because if you try to read every single word in sequence, it could be pretty daunting for a lot of people. So, you know, I'm sure you do too, but I encourage the listeners to get a copy and flip through and just try to experience some of the the great parts of it. So, any last thoughts on the City of God before we move on to another episode? Well, I would say don't make it your bedtime reading. Although, you know, Flattery O'Connor, the great Catholic short story writer, she used to read the Suma as her bedtime reading and it wasn't because it put her to sleep. So, I guess it depends on what you're interested in. But I use it more as a reference book. I just find passages in it that like the one I just read, that are so insightful that helped me to think about our current political and cultural situation to give me hope that, okay, even if this all falls apart, the way Rome did, God's on his throne and the City of God will last forever. Oh, last forever. My dad said when he read it, he said it's not that he learned a lot reading it, it's that he learned where everything he already knew came from. Good. It helps you to put it all in its place. Yeah, it's a framework. Nice place to stop. Well, thank you Paul and God bless you and we'll see you next time. Thank you. God bless you and all of our listeners. This has been an episode of The Spiritual Masters, a podcast from Tan Books and Tan Direction. To follow the show, learn about more inspiring holy men and women, and to get special offers exclusive to Spiritual Masters listeners, sign up at SpiritualMastersPodcast.com and thanks for listening.