The City of God, Volume II
- 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) · 20 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~240,000 words · 1,137 passages
Cite this work
- APAAugustine. (n.d.). The City of God, Volume II. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/the-city-of-god-volume-ii
- MLAAugustine. The City of God, Volume II. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/the-city-of-god-volume-ii.
- ChicagoAugustine. The City of God, Volume II. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/the-city-of-god-volume-ii.
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 second half: the history of the two cities from their origin to the last judgement, and what exactly they are.
Context and history
The definition arrives after thousands of pages: two cities made by two loves — self-love to the contempt of God, love of God to the contempt of self — and, a point often forgotten, neither of them is the Church or the Empire. They are mixed together and cannot be separated until the end. Augustine is not producing a political theory of Christian power; if anything he disarms one.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
to sin and subject to death. And the kingdom of death so reigned over men, that the deserved penalty of sin would have hurled all headlong even into the second death, of which there is no end, had not the undeserved grace of God saved some therefrom. And thus it has come to pass, that though there are very many and great nations all over the earth, whose rites and customs, speech, arms, and dress, are distinguished by marked differences, yet there are no more than two kinds of human society, which we may justly call two cities, according to the language of our Scriptures. The one consists of those who wish to live after the flesh, the other of those who wish to live after the spirit; and when they severally achieve what they wish, they live in peace, each after their kind. 2. _Of carnal life, which is to be understood not only of living in bodily indulgence, but also of living in the vices of the inner man._ First, we must see what it is to live after the flesh, and what to live after the spirit. For any one who either does not recollect, or does not sufficiently weigh, the language of sacred Scripture, may, on first hearing what we have said, suppose that the Epicurean philosophers live after the flesh, because they place man's highest good in bodily pleasure; and that those others do so who have been of opinion that in some form or other bodily good is man's supreme good; and that the mass of men do so who, without dogmatizing or philosophizing on the subject, are so prone to lust that they cannot delight in any pleasure save such as they receive from bodily sensations: and he may suppose that the Stoics, who place the supreme good of men in the soul, live after the spirit; for what is man's soul, if not spirit? But in the sense of the divine Scripture both are proved to live after the flesh.…