The City of God, Volume I
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 1 illegible passage, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~230,000 words · 1,078 passages
Cite this work
- APAAugustine. (n.d.). The City of God, Volume I. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/the-city-of-god-volume-i
- MLAAugustine. The City of God, Volume I. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/the-city-of-god-volume-i.
- ChicagoAugustine. The City of God, Volume I. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/the-city-of-god-volume-i.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The first half of the City of God: the refutation of the old gods and of the idea that abandoning them had ruined Rome.
Context and history
Augustine began it in 413, three years after the Goths sacked Rome. The charge going about was that the city had fallen because it had turned Christian, and the book was born to answer it; hence the first part is polemical and historical before it is theological. He worked at it for thirteen years and it ran to twenty-two books. The division into two volumes belongs to the edition.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
revolt from the conduct of the wicked, and live in quite another fashion, yet spare those faults in other men which they ought to reprehend and wean them from; and spare them because they fear to give offence, lest they should injure their interests in those things which good men may innocently and legitimately use,--though they use them more greedily than becomes persons who are strangers in this world, and profess the hope of a heavenly country. For not only the weaker brethren, who enjoy married life, and have children (or desire to have them), and own houses and establishments, whom the apostle addresses in the churches, warning and instructing them how they should live, both the wives with their husbands, and the husbands with their wives, the children with their parents, and parents with their children, and servants with their masters, and masters with their servants,--not only do these weaker brethren gladly obtain and grudgingly lose many earthly and temporal things on account of which they dare not offend men whose polluted and wicked life greatly displeases them; but those also who live at a higher level, who are not entangled in the meshes of married life, but use meagre food and raiment, do often take thought of their own safety and good name, and abstain from finding fault with the wicked, because they fear their wiles and violence. And although they do not fear them to such an extent as to be drawn to the commission of like iniquities, nay, not by any threats or violence soever; yet those very deeds which they refuse to share in the commission of, they often decline to find fault with, when possibly they might by finding fault prevent their commission.…