Answer each question in one or two complete sentences.

“All things under the sun are vanity” (St. Augustine, City of God)

Saint Augustine was born Aurelius Augustinus in AD 354 in what is now Algeria. He grew up as a pagan, although his mother was Christian, and received a thorough education in philosophy and in rhetoric, the highest subject in the classical system of his time. He became a teacher in Milan, in those days the official capital of the Western Roman Empire (Rome was the “Eternal City” but had long since ceased to be the actual capital). In AD 386 he converted to Christianity, baptized the next year by the Bishop of Milan, known to history as Saint Ambrose. He eventually became a priest, and then Bishop of the city of Hippo (back in present-day Algeria) in AD 396.

Augustine was inspired to write City of God by the sack of the city of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410, an event which sent shock-waves through the entire Roman world. How could the “Eternal City” fall into the hands of barbarians? Pagans, still numerous in the Empire at this time, blamed Christianity, claiming that Rome was punished for having abandoned its ancient gods. Augustine wrote originally to refute this argument. He expanded upon his original inspiration and presented a Christian view of the world and its history, from its beginning in creation to its future end, and of all humanity in relation to God. He began writing in AD 413 and completed the book in AD 426, the most monumental of a large number of writings. He died four years later, as another Germanic tribe, the Vandals, besieged Hippo.

Augustine was enormously influential even in his own time. His worldview dominated western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance. One cannot understand the Middle Ages without understanding Augustine, which is why I’ve assigned excerpts from City of God as summer reading, and why you have this reading guide to help you comprehend it.

RECOMMENDED APPROACH:

Read the entire selection from Augustine once straight through, without looking at the worksheet questions. This will give you the “big picture” of the text.

Then, read it more carefully and answer the questions. Plan ahead and take some time, Augustine is high-level thinking and City of God is not for the faint of heart or brain. If you give yourself three weeks, you can take it in bite-size pieces, about three questions per day, and be done in plenty of time without having to burn the midnight oil.

Mr. Hoepner

Preface
1.  What is the “City of God”?
2.  Where is it?
3.  What and where is the “earthly city”?
Book I
Chapter 1 / 1. Who were the “enemies” against whom Augustine wrote?
2. Why does he believe they should have more respect for the Christian God?
3. Why does he think they are “at risk of being punished in everlasting darkness”?
Book II
Ch 2
Ch 3 / 1. What was it that Augustine argued against in Book I?
2. Who or what were the “devils” to whom people offered “abominable sacrifices”?
3. How does Augustine counter the arguments of his opponents regarding the source of Rome’s calamities?
Book XI
Ch 1
Ch 17
Ch 18
Ch 19-20
Ch 21
Ch 22 / 1. Augustine writes that the two cities, earthly and heavenly, are “in this present world commingled, and as it were entangled together.” What do you think he means?
2. What kind of nature did even the devil have originally?
3. What, then, is the source of the devil’s evil?
4. What is God able to bring about even through the will of evil people?
5. Identify the different meanings Augustine finds for the story of the creation of light and darkness from Genesis 1.
6. List all the attributes of God that you can find in Chapter 21
7. How does Augustine show that even things that people see as evil are in fact good?
Book XIV
Ch 1
Ch 13 / 1. According to Augustine, what did Adam and Eve’s sin do to humanity?
2. Augustine writes that there are only two kinds of human society, which make up his two “cities.” What are they?
3. What does Augustine identify as the actual source of Adam and Eve’s sin?
4. What are the outcomes of pride and humility that “[seem] to be contradictory”?
5. How do these two outcomes relate to the two cities?
Book XV
Ch 1
Ch 4
Ch 5 / 1. According to Augustine, how does one become a “citizen of the city of God,” and why can it only be this way?
2. What are the limits of even the highest “good” that the earthly city can achieve?
3. Who was originally “the founder of the earthly city,” and why does Augustine call him a “fratricide”?
4. What can we learn about the “earthly city” by comparing Romulus and Remus to Caine and Abel?
Book XIX
Ch 4
Ch 10
Ch 17
Ch 18
Ch 20
Ch 27-28 / 1. What is the difference between Christians’ and the Philosophers’ view of what the “supreme good” is?
2. How does Augustine show that the Philosophers must be wrong?
3. How do even the virtues show that the philosophers must be wrong ?
Prudence:
Temperance:
Justice:
Fortitude:
4. What does Augustine mean when he writes that the evils of this life have such a “mighty force” that they can “make fortitude a homicide”?
5. Augustine accepts that this life is misery even for “the saints.” However, for them even the misery accomplishes some good. How is this so?
6. For what reason do even citizens of the City of God “obey the laws of the earthly city” and thus live in harmony with the people of the earthly city?
7. For what one cause would the citizens of the City of God oppose the peace of the earthly city?
8. What sources of truth are available to the Christian, according to Augustine?
9. Where is room left for “doubt” (Augustine’s term for “freedom of thought”)?
10. Why does Augustine say that even a person who in this life has “all the blessings of body and soul” is still only blessed “not in reality so much as in hope”?
11. What three “submissions” make up “the righteousness of a man”?
12. What will happen to those who are not part of the City of God, according to Augustine?
13. In what way would even that fate, perhaps, be a form of eternal life?

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