from Gerard O'Daly's AUGUSTINE's
CITY OF GOD A reader's guide (2020)
pages 220-222 selections
Christianity is no less free from dissension
than are the secular cities with their
philosophical schools: heretics abound.
Yet they ultimately bring benefits to the
Church, testing both its patience & its
wisdom. They also give Christians an oppor-
tunity to practice neighbourly love, whether this
takes the soft form of persuasive teaching or
the hard form of stern discipline. The Devil,
the chief (Latin princeps ) of the impious
city (Book 18 #51) can do the City of God
no lasting harm. Providence uses evil to good
ends. But heretics and other dissidents are
a source of scandal and dismay to Christians,
and discourage others from joining the Church.
Distress and anguish are therefore a feature of
the Church: (Book 18 #51) The Church proceeds
a pilgrim (LATIN peregrinando) in these evil
days, not merely since the time of the bodily
presence of Christ and his Apostles, but since
Abel himself, the first righteous man, whom his
impious brother killed, and from then on until
the end of time, among the persecutions of the world
and the consolations of God.
There may and may not be more persecutions
in the time of the Antichrist. . .Augustine resists
the temptation to be precise about when this will
happen. He does not wish to adopt beliefs
(millennial or other) about the specific duration
of the Church in history or Christ's second coming.
A. is particularly scathing about the otherwise
unknown oracle claiming that the apostle Peter
used sorcery to ensure that Christianity would
survive for 365 years (see Book 22 #25 & Book
18 #53-4). Thus, the glimpse into the
future reaches no clear conclusion. Instead,
concluding Books 15 - 18, A. summarizes his
general argument in these four books:
We have demonstrated sufficiently, we believe,
the mortal course of the two cities, the
heavenly and the earthly, which are mixed from
beginning to end. One of the, the earthly
city, has made for itself the false gods it
wished, from any source -- even making them
out of humans -- to serve these with sacrifices;
the other city, a heavenly alien on earth,
does not make false gods, but is itself
made by the true God, to be itself his
true sacrifice. Both alike equally make use
of the good things, or are afflicted with
the devils, of our temporal condition, with
a different faith, a different hope, a
different love, until they are separated
by the last judgement, and each receives
its own end, of which there is no end
(Book 18 #54).
With the end of Book #18, Augustine's
account of the historical course (Latin
procurus) of the two cities is complete!
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