5 - Books 4 & 5

Summary

In the first three books of City of God, Augustine begins to defend Christianity against those who blame it for the sack of Rome. More specifically, Augustine is responding to both the written theological questions of the pagan Volusian, the proconsul of Africa (ep. 135), and Volusian’s spoken concerns relayed by his Christian friend, Marcellinus (ep. 136), that Christianity and Roman citizenship were incompatible. In his aim of exonerating the Christians from blame for Rome’s fall, Augustine, as Markus suggests, speaks of Rome “as an outsider.” But Rome plays a more complicated role in Augustine’s argument. For Augustine, we are a complex amalgam of experiences, memories, habits, affections, dispositions, and reason, all of which shape, both consciously and subconsciously, what we love. “To have a past,” as Wetzel observes, is “to admit grief into wisdom.” Augustine shares with his audience many of the same affective memories derived from his Roman upbringing and education. One need only recall Augustine’s recollection of how Virgil moved him to tears as a youth (conf. 1.13.20–21). Books 4 and 5 read not as a break from this Roman past, but as a recasting of memory. Citing Roman sources along the way, Augustine detaches paganism from romanticized images of Rome’s past, showing that traditional Roman religious practices not only fail to account for Roman successes, but also are the contrivance of elites used to conceal their criminality and justify domination.