Originally published at crisis magazine
Editor’s Note: This is the sixth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.
It was the one project St. Augustine prized above all others and would spend fourteen years of his life putting it all together: The City of God. He finished the last of the twenty-two books in the year 426, just two years before the barbarians reached North Africa, laying siege to Hippo where he, its saintly bishop, would himself die two years later, in August of 430. Almost at once, the work achieved near legendary status and is today regarded as one of the great and enduring classics of world literature. It is like one of those amazing crop dusters that covers everything in sight, managing with seeming effortlessness to canvass not only the pagan cosmology upon which the religion of Rome rested but the impact of the Christian alternative that would blow it all to pieces.
Of course, not everyone was edified. Edward Gibbon, for instance, animated by his usual scorn for all things Catholic, airily dismissed the entire effort on the grounds that, “His learning is too often borrowed and
