I had no idea what I was getting into when I began this book. It sometimes felt like it would never end, but it was a great experience. First, I discovered how early on very basic Christian doctrines were lost. I loved what he says about the trinity. I was fascinated by how he defined demons (man-made gods). I would define a demon as a devil's angel. Also interesting to me was Augustine's take on the God of Israel's name being the conjugated Hebrew verb "to be" rendered "I am that I am." To me, this seems a very obvious way of showing that He is the only God who actually, in fact, exists - the only God who is not "the workmanship of man's hands" as it were.

There is an awful lot of time wasted on incredibly menial an irrelevant questions - like whether God can count infinite numbers - whether He knows they exist (Really? Why?). Then there were bits I found very entertaining, like Augustine's insistence that woman is weaker than man, and it was she who succumbed to temptation because Adam was too strong, and Solomon was too strong - he had to be led into temptation by his wives - or that Aaron wouldn't have made the golden calf without Miriam's making the decision first. Most convenient and amusing, I thought.

However, there were also really beautiful and profound parts:

"Pride is the beginning of sin. And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation - when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself."

Also "...Though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked." (Very similar metaphor in Isaiah 28 - the parable of the Lord, the Farmer) He continues to say that "...So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them." Beautiful!

Also, "No sin is committed save by that desire or will by which we desire that it be well with us and shrink from it being ill with us. That therefore is a lie which we do in order that it may be well with us, but which makes us more miserable than we were. And why is this, but because the source of man's happiness lies only in God, whom he abandons when he sins." I really liked these nuggets.

Augustine seems to spend a lot of time trying to prove points that I feel are completely irrelevant – e.g. is it possible for a human body to burn eternally in fire and not be consumed? He goes on to explain that because there is a specimen of worm that not only lives in a hot spring, but nowhere else, a body could last eternity in fire and not be consumed. Who cares about this stuff? And why does it matter? And why is it for us to figure out? The mechanics of how God does things – those are the things I feel are much better left to faith.

Excellent. Great.

What is there to say about perhaps the greatest book ever written, other than Thanks be to God.

It gives an incisive, highly perceptive critique on the prevailing ways of the world, which have not changed as much as we like to believe. But in advocating an ideal alternative, he makes the ancient case for theocracy, be it formal or informal. If our fallen minds are so inherently prone to inhumanity, then we should submit ourselves to guidance by higher minds.

La più monumentale opera agostiniana, il De Civitate Dei, segna un punto importante nella dottrina cattolica ma anche nella storia della filosofia e nella filosofia della storia: al di là del contenuto teologico - importante, va da sé - il De Civitate Dei introduce per la prima volta nella filosofia la storia, approntando tramite le vicende dell'Antico Testamento prima e la storia della civiltà greco-romana poi la dissertazione escatologica sulla storia dell'uomo e sull'utilizzo che di essa fa Dio. Agostino afferma come la visisione greca di storia, improntata su una idea circolare, manchi del peccato e dunque di quel termine fondamentale della storia umana che è il riscatto dal peccato originale. Egli dunque sposa l'idea di storia umana come un proelium, una lotta, fra gli eserciti del Bene e quelli del Male, col significato che Dio interviene nella vita degli uomini per educarli e liberarli dalle catene del peccato, della 'privatio boni'.

Questa lotta è la lotta fra due tipi di città, fondate su due tipi di amore: quello terreno per se stessi e quello celeste per Dio. L'amore per Dio è l'affermazione più alta del disprezzo del sé peccatore, non della propria corporeità che Agostino pone in una indissolubile unità con l'anima.

Come avevamo udito, così abbiamo visto
nella città del Signore degli eserciti,
nella città del nostro Dio; (Salmo 47,9)

La Città di Dio ripropone il problema del tempo, del peccato e dell'eternità in un contesto più ampio, in cui configurare il rapporto tra città terrena e città celeste e quindi misurare la distanza che separa la visione cristiana della storia e della società da quella pagana. Il piano cristiano-agostiniano è un piano storico-esistenziale di liberazione definitiva dell'uomo dalla peregrinazione storica cui la Città di Dio è costretta nella vita terrena.

This book weighs in at over 1,000 pages - 22 books in the original. Fortunately for the reader, St. Augustine frequently wanders from his main theme, for many pages at a time, providing fascinating explorations of why the number 11 symbolises sin (short answer: it transgresses the perfect 10 of the Decalogue); of how the Ark of Noah is an allegory of Christ; of the creation and fall of the angels, and of much, much more.

These questions are digressions, but they do help to make the book palatable to the modern reader. Perhaps the best way to read is to plunge into the book a few hundred pages in; beginning at the beginning is like beginning the Bible at Genesis 1: one is likely to get bogged down part way through. St. Augustine wrote the book during the years 413-426: if he could take 13 years writing his baggy but entertaining monster, the reader can hardly be expected to digest it in a single gulp.

The "City of God" should on no account be confused with the "Mystical City of God", an even more voluminous work by a 17th-century Spanish nun named Maria of Agreda.

I finally finished it!

This one held me back a bit on my reading goal for the year.

Upon finishing this audiobook my first thought was that I needed to listen to it again. It can be a bit dense at times. Augustine exhausts all possibilities in his analytics. He is both thorough and profound, both logical and filled with faith and wonder at the great mysteries of God, and in this work he tackles a number of theological questions, from what day of creation the angels were created to whether or not an aborted baby attains salvation or not. I'm convinced that this work is one of the pillars that make up the theological foundation of the church.
The book is loosely formulated as an examination of the city of God as compared to the earthly city of the time, Rome. Rome being a corrupted reflection of the perfect and incorruptible city of God. This framing of the book works beautifully to expound on Augustine's platonic dualism between material and spiritual, earthly and heavenly, imperfect and perfect.

I particularly enjoyed his exegesis of the first several chapters of Genesis, and I think I will be re-visiting those sooner than the entire work. It seemed to me that his interpretation of creation was open to long stretches of time rather than 24 hour days. His view of God's creation on earth I found to be inspiring. He pointed out that God works and creates within a natural structure that he created. We often think of God in creation pointing a finger and 'BOOM' a tree pops out of nothing and God created the tree, but Augustine sees every blade of grass that grows from seed to blade, every tree from its seed, and every child in the womb growing within his mother as an active form of God's creation. This perspective changes certain verse meanings like in Genesis 1:11-12,

"11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Augustine interprets this to be happening within God's natural framework. Rather than a sort of human-like creator who might paint these things into existence or bring them into existence from nothing. Augustine argues that God created natural systems that brought forth these creations over time, and that these natural systems are God's active creation. That every growing thing on the earth is an active creation of God.

To me, this interpretation is quite advanced for it's time and seems to be open to the idea of an evolutionary process being a possible form of God's creation in Genesis 1.

I only regret that I skipped so many things on my reading list between Plato and Augustine because he references any and every important work between them.

I plan on revisiting this work when I reach it again on the timeline.

Could not finish it. Don't care to. It's a rather lengthy and often times boring read. I got enough of the gist by making it about halfway through and then skipping around through the rest. His unsurprising righteous indignation about the truth and beauty of 4th century Christian doctrine and the falsity and demoralizing nature of "paganism" makes me want to run for the bathroom. But when I look upon it as a book written by a man whose mind would've been blown by the mere revelation that the Earth is indeed spherical rather than a dinner plate shaped planet in the apple of God's eye, well, then I can appreciate it a little more on other levels that don't so dramatically offend my need for more plausible understandings of reality. It was really only enjoyable as a historical record of the tail end of the protracted decline of the Roman Empire and the impending rise of Christianity.

One of the best books ever written. Augustine wrote this just as Rome was coming to an end. Part of the impetus was to show that the City of God was not confined to the Roman Empire, but would outlast any earthly empire. The amount of detail he poured into describing the pagan culture of his time was also amazing. Also, he offers some fascinating theological insights towards the end of the book.

If you want to understand Western Christendom, you really have to read this book from cover to cover.

You probably classify books semi-consciously as; Books to make you Happy, Books to make you Good, Books to make you Smart. And then you'll once in a while get a book like this one, that says things like, "it will readily occur to any one that the blessedness which an intelligent being desires as its legitimate object results from a combination of these two things, namely, that it uninterruptedly enjoy the unchangeable good... and that it be delivered from all dubiety, and know certainly that it shall eternally abide in the same enjoyment." And you realize you have to adjust all your categories, because you're suddenly seeing the universe from several angles at once.
This book is part of the nerve system of the Western tradition. You could do far worse with a month of serious study than spend time with it.

There can be no doubt that this work is the hallmark of philosophy in the first millennium, all-encompassing and yet almost too eloquent to be a tome of any systematic characteristics. Sometimes he can get protracted and entangled in some trivial theological issues, but by and large he addresses the most fundamental philosophical and theological issues with such a profundity that no writer had reached before his days. Meanwhile, through the pages of this masterpiece, St. Augustine proves himself, perhaps unintentionally, to be an outstanding scholar of pagan culture as well in that he recounts the Greek and Roman classics, religious or otherwise, as easily as breathing. What calamity has befallen our education such that we no longer produce polymathic scholars of this kind!

What else am I going to rate it?

I guess part of what makes a book a theological classic is that it changes the way you think--and City of God is definitely that kind of book. It's a stunning mix of addressing everything from the faults of Platonism to how Christian women should think through the threat of rape (in an empire being pillaged by barbarians) to tracing God's people throughout history to correcting those who think that church participation without faith and faithfulness is sufficient to dealing with practical questions about the nature of resurrection bodies. There's something for everyone.

I learned a lot. What struck me the most was how careful an exegete he is, critiquing his opponents for citing Scripture out of context, and paying very close attention to the text. Even when he proposed interpretations that I didn't see, it was typically responding to details in the passage that I hadn't even noticed. So I'm thankful for his example of careful attention to the words of Scripture.

Augustine ends City of God by saying, "It may be too much for some, too little for others. Of both these groups I ask forgiveness. But of those for whom it is enough I make this request: that they do not thank me but join with me in rendering thanks to God. Amen. Amen." I am thankful to God not only for how this brother from 1700 years ago sought to serve the church, but his humility in giving glory to God for the work Augustine has done in order to build up the saints.