This chapter asks whether Robert Dodaro and John Milbank are correct in their claim that Augustine thought that the earthly city was necessarily a place of political vice. To this end, this chapter examines Augustine’s idea of the love of material possessions, the love of glory, and the love of domination, and finds that while he looked on these loves as always sinful, he held that they did not necessarily lead people to commit politically vicious actions, but could in fact act as a restraint on people’s actions, ensuring that people conformed their lives to the highest political and social standards.

Chapter 12 explores Augustine’s Christocentric speculations on the beatific resurrection of the saints to eternal life. Particularly in Book 22 of De ciuitate dei, Augustine displays both moderation in his tentative articulations and generosity in his allowance of a wide range of eschatological prospects within the parameters set by Scripture and the resurrected Christ. Considering the spiritual body and the ecclesial body of the beatific resurrection, Augustine discusses the perfection of human freedom, the vigor and beauty of the saints’ resurrected flesh, the vindication of history in their resurrected bodies and memories, and the unity and diversity of the resurrected Church. Augustine develops his understanding of the beatific vision to articulate the prospect that it will come not only after, but also from within the beatific resurrection. Enjoying forever the insatiable satisfaction of God, the resurrected community of the saints will indefatigably celebrate and praise the God of the resurrection.

Alternative cities structure Augustine’s City of God. The divide between the earthly and the heavenly city returns in his two Romes, a violent city of civil war and a violent city of virtue, in his two Jerusalems, a violent city of civil war and a city prefiguring God’s city, and even among Christians, divided between love of self and love of God. Although the heavenly city’s full realization is deferred to after the end of history, in this life, the heavenly city exists, mixed with the earthly city, on a pilgrimage toward realization. Rome, a dark shadow (umbra) that sets the light of the divine city in relief, instantiates the earthly city’s violence in both its horrific and virtuous manifestations. In its better form, Jerusalem advances toward the heavenly city’s realization as the prefiguration (figura) of what the divine city will realize (implementum).

This chapter aims to examine how Augustine appropriated Cicero’s philosophical thought. The first section studies the role of the Ciceronian protreptic Hortensius – the eudaimonism and the post-mortem destiny of the soul – in Augustine's philosophical project. The second analyzes the imprint of the philosophical dialogues of Cicero on Augustine’s early “Dialogues of Cassiciacum” (Contra academicos, De beata vita, De ordine, 386 ce); this influence is obvious in their literary genre and in the major philosophical topics they deal with (epistemology, ethics, providence). In his late masterpiece the City of God, Augustine discusses several Ciceronian notions (fate and foreknowledge; populus and respublica; passions) and translates them into a Christian framework: this is the focus of the third section. The last section outlines the evolution of Augustine’s judgment on Cicero, whom he considered a defender of the Neo-Academic position on the one hand, and, on the other, as a spokesman for Platonic philosophy.

This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.

Chapter 1 puts Thomas’s account in its historical context by discussing Augustine and his medieval reception. The first part of the chapter focuses on Augustine’s mature account of original sin, drawing on The City of God and his anti-Pelagian works. I argue that Augustine’s account contained several fruitful ambiguities which would be the basis for medieval reflection. How should we understand the transmission of original sin and the origin of the soul? In what sense are infants guilty of sin? How can we make sense of the claim that human nature has been “corrupted”? The second major part of the chapter discusses Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Peter Lombard. Each of these theologians defended original sin while challenging at least one important aspect of Augustine’s teaching. Anselm claimed that concupiscence cannot be sinful. Abelard denied original guilt. The Lombard emphatically denied traducianism and insisted that infants who die unbaptized are guilty only in a highly mitigated sense.