The City of God

Augustine of Hippo is one of the key thinkers in the Christian tradition, with an influence unparalleled in Western Christian theology by anyone after the apostle Paul. His landmark achievement—articulating Christian thought both as a cohesive, systematic philosophical worldview and as a deeply personal spirituality—set the groundwork for all subsequent developments in philosophy and theology in western Europe over the next thousand years, exercising nearly as great an influence on the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century as he did on his own Catholic tradition in the fifth century.

Augustine’s personal background shapes the City of God in several pronounced ways. His father, Patricius, was a pagan, while his mother, Monica, was a Christian, meaning that Augustine grew up with both religious contexts. Since the relation between these two religious traditions is the central concern of City of God, Augustine is uniquely positioned to write about them. As a young man, after a period of dissolute living, Augustine became interested in the Manichaean religious tradition. Though he would later recant Manichaeism and argue against its chief tenets, its focus on the dynamic interrelationship between good and evil likely prepared him to think about moral and speculative philosophy in a way that highlighted the distinctive