About This Blog

The idea is simple:  to read through St. Augustine's City of God and jot down a few notes as I go.

So why blog about it?  Most of us can read a book by ourselves, without announcing it to the world.  Just buy some highlighters and a little pen for marking up the margins, and there you go.

But The City of God is an unusual book.  For one thing, it is huge -- nearly twelve hundred pages.  For another, it is dense and difficult, the way philosophy often is.  Reading it is hard work, or I would have done it years ago, and so would lots of other people.  So writing down my comments in public may serve two purposes.  It may keep me going, when I might otherwise get lazy and quit.  And, with any luck, it may inspire a few other people to take up the City of God and read it for themselves.

After all, this book is hugely important.  It is the longest sustained work by one of the most important figures in Western history.  For sixteen centuries, it has shaped the religious life of the Christian world, not to mention to political thinking of the West.  In that sense, it is a "classic," meaning a book which continues to be printed for the sole purpose of boring students.  And yet, as the era of "Christendom" gives way way to a more determinedly pluralistic society, it is possible that The City of God -- a book about the end of one civilization and the start of another -- will actually become more important than ever. It may find a meaning in the 21st century that it has not enjoyed since the 5th.