The De civitate dei (DCD) of Augustine is a mountain few climb and fewer inhabit. It offers three hundred thousand words of meticulously plotted argument worked out over a decade and a half by a man in his sixties and seventies who had never undertaken so elaborate or ambitious a work. It has absorbed the efforts of many scholars exploring its arguments but few even attempting, much less succeeding, in capturing its manifold success as a work of art. At the same time, one has the sense that very few have read it end to end in the original, even with the help of the seven-volume Loeb or the five-volume Bibliothèque Augustinienne editions. If we understood it better at the literary and philological levels, we would be in a better position to assess its achievement and track its influence.
For a long time it had a bad reputation as a work of artifice, echoed in Henri Marrou’s famous mot “Saint Augustin compose mal” of 1938 (Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture classique [1938]), even though a decade later he made palinode for that dismissal (“jugement d’un jeune barbare ignorant et presomptueux” [Marrou, Retractatio (1948) 665]). There is no extensive and intensive commentary other than the now dated notes in the BA edition (P.G. Walsh and Gillian Clark have undertaken commentary but on a very modest scale compared to the magnitude of the work and its complexity).[1] The best introduction and companion more recently is Gerard O’Daly’s Augustine’s ‘City of God’: A Reader’s Guide (1999, rev. ed. 2020).
What don’t we know about the work? The bulk of scholarly effort brought to bear in recent decades, ever distracted by the shiny objects of intertextualities, has worried about Augustine’s reception of Platonism, remarkable just for the fact that the work has him revisiting Platonism twenty plus years after his youthful affair (his encounters in Milan really have the flavor of a youthful romantic fling) and doing so more seriously than one would think the busy and distracted bishop would have time for. His engagement with Porphyry, in particular, rivets modern attention, though few see in the fights Augustine picks just how similar Porphyry and Augustine were and how much they represented the same strains of late antique culture. What does not attract so much attention is the elaborate structure of biblical interpretation that Augustine erects on the cultures he inherits, but that is not really surprising. Modern readers have yet to come to grips with or even respect the extraordinary achievement of Christian writers wrestling the patchy, inconsistent, often barely intelligible texts of Jewish and Christian scripture into an ostensibly coherent foundation for the culture they were themselves making. How does one tell the difference between a better and a worse essay in patristic biblical interpretation? What makes one treatise or set of homilies compelling and successful and another not? I do not see that the questions are ever raised by moderns, who cannot allow that the genre amounts to ‘literature’ at all.
One leitmotif of the conversation about on DCD is, of course, its relationship with the ‘classical’ and Latin past. Tracing Augustine’s inheritance from his early education and the senses that he makes of it has preoccupied many scholars and adorned the footnotes and indices locorum of editions and translations. The most methodical undertaking was Harald Hagendahl’s 1967 Augustine and the Latin Classics and many of us have contributed to the discussion since. Here I would only underscore Augustine’s indebtedness to the school curriculum he had passed through and the chief school authors.
Cicero and Vergil, no surprise, loom largest in his citations and echoes of the past and in DCD, given both the theme of the work and his presence in the fourth-century curriculum. Sallust comes in a distant third. Augustine is the last in a line of fourth-century readers, however, of Cicero that outdid generations before or since in taking his philosophical works seriously: Arnobius, Lactantius, Ambrose, and Augustine all read philosophical Cicero with an intense attention and profit that generations with better Greek had and have never bothered to contribute. Ambrose and Augustine, in the former’s De officiis and the latter’s De doctrina christiana, undertook ex professo imitation and reworking of Cicero (Augustine modeling his DDC on Cicero’s orator) and I have argued that DCD is consciously set as a third partner to the dialogue between Plato’s Politeia and Cicero’s De republica.
Agnès Vareille now brings a more systematic method and a broader framing of the issues to revisit the questions of presence, influence, and absence, in this volume that began life as a Rouen doctoral thesis and came to completion at the Institut des études augustiniennes in Paris. Where others have sought every trace and whisper of the classical in order to build up a picture of what was in Augustine’s mind (I’ve been guilty of that), she has the discipline to concentrate explicitly on ‘citations’—not references, not allusions, not transposition of ideas, but on the text of DCD itself and the explicit, material, concrete ways in which it re-presents the classical in Augustine’s context. Hence her subtitular assertion of écriture polyphonique—the deliberate creation of a text in which the voices of the classical authors are deployed to be heard and respected and reacted to. Almost a hundred pages of appendices present the evidence with great care and offer a reference tool that others will, or at least should, use with profit.
The effect of taking this approach is to do justice to the actual text of DCD in a way that’s not been done before. Her work makes me conscious of just how much of our modern discourse about DCD has been about what’s going on not just in Augustine’s mind but in our own minds as scholars, preoccupied by issues of influence, tradition, and ideology that DCD evokes in us in a way that makes the text, and the actual Augustine on display in the text, of secondary importance. This approach enables her to do justice to the choices that Augustine made with a level of precision that is refreshing to see. The book should be read with attention by all readers of DCD but also, I would say, all readers coming to make their way through any part of the Augustinian forest, so important is DCD and so effective is Vareille. I will try to summarize what I take to be the essential and refreshingly radical interpretative strategy with which she succeeds.
Even when near-contemporaries admit that Augustine was not a sloppy writer, I think they (I mean we) have assumed something like this narrative of composition. In the wake of the sack of Rome of 410, Augustine was distracted by the laments of aristocratic Romans and the attraction they felt for imposing a ‘pagan’ interpretation on the events. Perhaps, he has them saying, if we had not neglected the gods, this wouldn’t have happened to us. Is this Christian god really up to the job of running the world?
Responding to such conversations (about which we know a fair amount), our conventional interpretation has seen that Augustine set out to refute that reading of current events by taking the battle to the other side’s familiar turf. The first five books of DCD, written off in a white heat in (let’s say) 413, are in many ways the last great Ciceronian book of antiquity. Rich in classical quotations and references, written in a classic style, these pages make the case for a Christian interpretation almost as Cicero (if he were alive then) would have done. My contribution to this interpretation has been to suggest that Augustine was saddling up, as it were, for one last display of his own professional powers as a classical rhetor, to show these people that the old man still had what it took and that he could make the Christian case using the most traditional tools. Augustine the show-off.
So far so good: but then I think we assume that Augustine lost focus a bit on the one hand and lost interest on the other, setting out on a rather different strategy to tell in a didactic way the real Christian story he wanted to tell all along. Time passed, he was busy, he was after all a bishop, and the polemical context of lament for sacked Rome (which hadn’t been all that badly battered) was gone, so we get in books 6-22 not Cicero redivivus (title of an article of mine), but the real, aging Augustine, his powers still quite intact, but his life now farther and farther remote from the classical world in which he had been brought up. The resulting work in that interpretation is one that a sympathetic reader like myself can praise and justify and defend as quite a fine thing of its sort.
Vareille gets what’s wrong with that interpretation. The clue has been in plain sight all along. In book 2 of DCD, Augustine engages with the nature of the Roman republic and takes, with Sallust, the position that the stability and merit of that republic had been long in question. He refers to Cicero and then promises to get back to talk about Cicero some more. Readers who got DCD in the serialized edition over years (we know that sections were released along the way) would likely have forgotten that little promise, but writing sometime between 421 and perhaps as late as 428 (he died in 430), Augustine comes quite punctiliously back to the question of Cicero and the republic in book 19. His point there is to take Cicero and Rome to task and insist on his terms that indeed the ‘Roman republic’ had never been a true republic (res populi) because Rome had never been a true populus. Its commitment to justice in its ordering was fatally flawed and only now, in book 19 (a magnificent set-piece in its own right), is Augustine ready to say in his, not Cicero’s terms, what it takes to make a just and humane social order. No surprise here, but the full Augustinian position is that no such society exists or has existed in “this world” and only Christian anticipation of the fulfillment of creation by God can bring such a thing about.
Vareille’s position is that Augustine knew all along that this was where he was going and had constructed DCD as he did in order to capture in the opening books a prima facie reading of events in the late antique world but then to make the work as a whole an embodiment of Augustine’s deepest insights and beliefs. It will require the attentive reader to work through Vareille patiently to see all this, but I digest that summation both to give her credit for what she has accomplished and to make it easier for a prospective reader to appreciate that accomplishment.
What I would add in a mildly speculative way here is the observation that Augustine’s first surviving work as a Christian writer had in a way forecast this line of development. Conventionally called Contra Academicos, the dialogue from 387 written on a Tusculum-like Italian estate in a Tusculan/Ciceronian style, has been taken as Augustine’s attack on Academic skepticism. But the manuscripts of the work more persuasively call it De Academicis and in fact something else is going on there. Augustine, then and later in his life, accepts that in all essentials the Academic skeptics were right. The upshot of philosophical study is recognition that the philosopher’s mission to discover a true interpretation of the world is doomed to failure and will dissolve in disputes among schools and worse. Augustine entirely agrees with that position and then pulls his rabbit out of a hat. Since that is true, he argues, something else is needed and the thing that is needed is the divine revelation of the true word of God. Augustine of 387 is ready for the rabbit, so to speak, and the Augustine of 413 and 428 is long practiced at dazzling an audience with his magic trick.
That, then, is where I see Vareille’s contribution breaking through to a better understanding not only of DCD but of Augustine and of what he was making of the late antique Christianity he had adopted and, in considerable measure, reinvented. This is a large claim to make for a book that is in its outward form (and almost 500 pages of familiar Études Augustiniennes format) conventional in appearance and technically argued, but I think it a necessary claim to make and accept.
Notes
[1] G. Clark, Commentary on Augustine, City of God (Oxford), books 1-5 (2021), books 6-10 (2024). P.G. Walsh, Augustine De Civitate Dei (5 vols., comprising books 1-16, Liverpool 2005-2018).