Book 1: Preface

"The most glorious city of God," says Augustine, is what he has taken pen in hand to defend, at the request of his "dear son Marcellinus."

This Marcellinus was a Roman imperial official, who a few years earlier had granted the Donatist schismatics in Carthage the right to worship.  In short order, he came to regret this decision, as the Donatists oppressed the Catholics.  In 411, he reversed course, and ordered the army to seize the Donatist churches and return them to the Catholics.  The violence with which this order was followed shocked even Augustine, himself no friend to the Donatists.  The Donatists got their revenge, though.  In 413, they arranged for Marcellinus to be arrested and ultimately executed; he is now regarded as a saint and martyr.

413, of course, is just the year in which Augustine began The City of God (which from this point forward in my blogging I will call DCD for short). Whether he began it before or after the death of his friend I do not know, although I can probably find out.  And after what I've just figured out, I think I'm gonna need to.

Let's start with the basics.

The Preface to Bk 1 is brief, but worth a close look. It shows something of Augustine's prose style, as well as opening up his theme.

The first lines would be, were they written in English, a jumbled run-on sentence.  Dods finds it best to thoroughly rearrange the clauses to create a good English paragraph.  The original word order, rendered without much attention to grammar, looks like this:

The most glorious City of God -- whether in the course of this time, as a pilgrim who lives by faith (Hab. 2:4) among the impious, or in the fixity of its everlasting seat, which it now awaits by patience  ("for justice shall be turned to righteousness" (Ps. 94:15) one after another, gaining by eminence the final victory and perfect peace) -- is the object of this work I have taken up, along with my promise to you that I should defend it against those who to its Founder prefer their own gods (my dear son Marcellinus) ; it is a great and difficult work, but God is our helper (Ps. 61:9).

That's pretty rough, but it gives a sense of how the opening lines flow. It also demonstrates one consistent characteristic of Augustine's writing:  his use of densely-packed Biblical quotations and near-quotations.  The frequency with which he drops a phrase or two from the psalms, in particular demonstrates a very, very deep familiarity.  He was a monk, after all, and no doubt spent a good portion of his day reciting them.

The quotation from Ps. 94 demonstrates another Augustinian characteristic.  In Latin, it says quoadusque iustitia convertatur in iudicium.  The words can be translated in different ways:  justice, judgment, righteousness, and so forth.  What interests me is the alliteration.  This and assonance -- words that sound alike -- are an important part of Augustine's style, and one that is easily lost in translation.

We see the same thing in the next passage:  "For I know how much force the work requires, that the proud be persuaded how much is the excellence of humility."  Force, viribus, sounds like virtus, excellence.  The inflection makes the similarity seem greater than it is; viribus is the dative plural of vis, virtus is a noun derived from vir, a man.  And again, in a wonderful phrase that Dods translates as "the earthly city, which itself ... is ruled by its lust to rule." The key expression there is dominandi libido dominatur.  Say it a few times, and then try applying it to your tyrant of choice; it's a memorable slur.

But the stylistic hammer really comes down toward the end of the preface, when Augustine juxtaposes the mottoes of the two cities that are his master metaphor.

The motto of the heavenly city, we read, is Deus superbis resistit, humilibus autem dat gratiam.  This means "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the the humble."  It occurs in both James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5 (and the words are the same in Greek, too, suggesting a common source).

For the motto of the earthly city, meanwhile, Augustine takes these words:  Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.  Roughly, it means to spare the oppressed and fight the proud -- not a bad parallel to the Biblical motto.  It is taken from from Virgil's Aeneid (6:854), and is a phrase that Augustine's readers would have recognized immediately.  For those who may not know, the Aeneid is an essential work of Latin literature, an epic poem offering a mythical, Homeric history of Rome mixed in with praise for the leadership of Octavian, better known as Caesar Augustus.  Written just around the time of Christ, it was an instant classic, read, memorized and recited throughout the Roman world, a masterpiece both of literature and, strangely, of political propaganda.  In many ways, it told the ancient Romans, who had recently traded their republic for an empire, who they had now become.  And the expression Parcere subiectis is central to that message.

It occurs during Aeneas' visit to the underworld, where he sees the dead spritis of Dido, who killed herself for love of him, and of his father Anchises.  His father foretells the story of the nation Aeneas is fighting to build, the nation that will become Rome, and in the midst of it offers what we would today call a mission statement.  Other nations may be better at forging bronze, carving marble, scanning the stars, even pleading legal causes -- Greece, as all Romans knew, was better at all these things.

           But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power
           the peoples of the earth -- these will be your arts:
           to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,
           to spare the defeated, break the break the proud in war.

           (Robert Fagles translation)

It is an aggressive move, deliberately getting in the face of the Roman refugees then living in in North Africa by sniping -- from the outset -- at a beloved emblem of their imperial self-image.

Here is Augustine, setting up his two "cities".  The motto of one is taken from the Scripture, of the other from Virgil -- one motto constitutes the marching orders of the Christian Church, the other of the Roman state.  And although they are not so very different in meaning, they are opposed (says Augustine) because the Romans have claimed for themselves a prerogative which belongs only to God.

This claim would have been strange to non-Christian readers, if Augustine actually had any.  "After all," they might answer, "Virgil wrote before your James and Peter -- perhaps they were stealing from him.  Rome's power was assured not by one supposed god, but by an entire pantheon.  And if, since the city fell to Alaric and his Goths, Rome's blessedness has been called into question -- a dubious claim -- certainly no Christian empire has arisen to replace it."

You can see why medieval Christians, especially in the West, liked this book so much -- to them, it must have actually seemed that Augustine was a prophet of their Carolingian world order, their "Christendom" -- a replacement for Virgil.  (It is not at all clear that Augustine had anything like this in mind; as I keep reading, one thing I will watch for carefully is how "visible" [in Lutheran terms] Augsutine's divine city is meant to be -- is it an actual community, or the spiritual condition of a community?)

But even if he did not mean to portray himself as a new Virgil, it is possible that Augustine embedded a rather audacious literary joke in the Preface to Book 1.  Because in Aeneid 6, a few lines after Parcere subiectis, Aeaneas sees two men not yet born.  The first is a man, a warrior decked in the spoils of war; this, says Anchises, is Marcellus, a hero in battle against the Gauls.  And the second is also named Marcellus, but he is a beautiful youth -- the beloved nephew, adopted son and heir presumptive of Augustus.

The description of this second Marcellus is another oft-quoted Virgilian moment.  He is "the child of heartbreak," and a tearful Anchises tells Aeneas (by which means Virgil no doubt assured Augustus) of how the young man's death had saddened the whole nation.  "O, fill my arms with lilies," says Anchises; "let me scatter flowers ... and perform a funeral rite."  Even the dead mourn Marcellus yet unborn.

Here then are Augustus and his adopted son Marcellus, great figures in the story of the earthly city -- in a book written by Augustinus for his metaphorical son Marcellinus about the heavenly city.  Whether Marcellus was living or dead when Augustine began to write, the parallel is striking.  And remember, many readers would have memorized the Aeneid, and so the parallel would ahve been instantly clear.

It is hard to be sure, but Augustine's use of Aeneid 6 looks doubly bold.  Not only does he set up the deeply-held self-image of the Roman people as a straw man to be knocked down by the Church, he replaces the emperor with a bishop -- himself -- and the emperor's child with a layman in his congregation.  It is a modestly subtle satire, but one which I suspect Roman readers would have recognized, and by which many would have been enraged.

All this, mind you, in two short paragraphs.  It's gonna be a loooong year.