Back in college, I had to the idea to read the entirety of the Church Fathers as part of my inquiry into Christian faith. At the time, I spotted a Penguin classic of Augustine's City of God that was reasonably priced, so it was one of the first investments I made in the Church Fathers. I didn't look at the page count -- it's a massive work, at well over 1000 pages of small print, and required the perseverance of a saint to get through.The way Augustine structured the work is very interesting. It actually consists of 22 "books", each of which contain around 20-30 "chapters". These chapters are quite often only a couple of pages long, and each chapter has a full sentence for its title, summarizing the main point made in the chapter. This is very helpful and it breaks working through a book of this size into manageable chunks. If Augustine was alive today, I am sure he would blog each chapter, and tweet his chapter headings.
The first major part of the book is devoted to defending Christianity against accusations that because Christians did not worship the Roman gods, they were to blame behind the recent sacking of Rome by the Goths. Augustine sets about showing how this is a ridiculous allegation. One of his major counter-arguments is to show how many similar and worse atrocities occurred in the Roman empire before the advent of Christianity:
How can our opponents have the effrontery, the audacity, the impudence, the imbecility (or rather the insanity) to refuse to blame their gods for those catastrophes, while they hold Christ responsible for the disasters of modern times?
This moves him onto his next major theme, which could be called "The Gods Delusion", where Augustine starts to examine the vast pantheon of gods worshiped by the Romans, pointing out all kinds of ridiculous inconsistencies, particularly relating to how the areas of jurisdiction of different gods overlapped. For example, if the goddess "Victory" gives all victory in war, then what exactly does Jupiter, king of the gods do?
He makes short shrift of astrology, stating that "it is blatantly obvious that multitudes of people conceived or born at the same time as each other have greatly differing destinies". Along the way he makes some incisive comments on the relationship between "divine foreknowledge and human free will", which he argues are not incompatible.
For God would never have created a man, let alone an angel, in the foreknowledge of his future evil state, if he had not known at the same time how he would put such creatures to good use, and thus enrich the course of world history by the kind of antithesis which gives beauty to a poem.
Elsewhere he states that "God was not unaware of any event in the future, and yet he did not, by his foreknowledge, compel anyone to sin".
He then moves into what is essentially a book review and critique of the massive works of Marcus Varro. Augustine has great respect for Varro's intellect, but criticizes him for not having the guts to disbelieve in the gods. He again pokes fun at the the ridiculous parceling out of small domains to gods. A favorite example of his were the three different gods for the door, the hinges, and the latch. He can be quite humorous in places, nowhere more so than when he discusses the whole plethora of gods required to ensure that a newly married couple get to have sex, ending with him wryly commenting that he felt sorry for the bridegroom who didn’t seem to have anything left to do for himself!
One lesson perhaps we can draw from Augustine is his willingness to engage deeply with the beliefs of the pagan culture. He clearly knew a lot about Roman beliefs, philosophy, myths and history, and from that position was able to make a very thorough critique of the whole system.
Moving on from gods, he turns to consider the philosophical ideas of Plato (which he thinks is the philosophy closest to Christianity). He asks what the "Summum Bonum" (the ultimate good) is, and here defines it by saying that "man's true good should be found not in the enjoyment of the body or mind, but in the enjoyment of God", although later in the book he says that "eternal life is the Supreme Good and eternal death the Supreme Evil, and that to achieve the one and escape the other, we must live rightly".
Although most of the first part of the book is a critique of Roman beliefs, he does along the way begin to build a case for belief in the God of the Bible. This leads into the second major part of the book which is essentially a tale of two cities -- the city of God and the city of man. Augustine interprets the whole of human history in terms of these two cities.
This is an important work, particularly on a day like election day.