Augustine on the City of God: Two Loves, Two Cities

The Quote

"Two loves, then, have given rise to two cities: the earthly city, which is created by a love of self, even to the point of contempt for God; and the heavenly city, which is created by the love of God, even to the point of contempt for self." So Augustine, in Book XIV of The City of God, named the two spiritual orientations that, for him, run through all of human history.

Context

Augustine wrote The City of God (De Civitate Dei) over thirteen years, completing it around 426 CE. The immediate occasion was the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 — a catastrophe that pagans blamed on the abandonment of the old gods and that Augustine set out to answer. But the work grew far beyond its apologetic origin into a theology of history, a critique of earthly empire, and a meditation on the two spiritual orientations that Augustine saw running through every human community. The two cities — the city of man and the City of God — are not institutions but communities of love: groups defined by what they love most. Book XIV, Chapter 28 gives the formula that has become the most quoted sentence of the work.

Meaning

The formula makes a series of claims. First, that cities — human communities of every kind — are constituted by love: by what their members love most, by the ordering of the heart that holds them together. Second, that there are two fundamental orderings: love of self (even to contempt for God) and love of God (even to contempt for self). The earthly city is the community of those whose love is directed toward themselves — toward their own power, glory, and satisfaction — and who are willing to disregard God to secure it. The heavenly city is the community of those whose love is directed toward God — toward the good that exceeds the self — and who are willing to renounce self to secure it. Third, that these two loves are the root of the two cities: the institutions, the histories, and the destinies of the two cities are expressions of the loves that animate them. The formula is not a dualism — Augustine is not saying there are two equal powers — but a theology of history: the earthly city will pass, the City of God will endure, and the meaning of history is the slow, hidden working out of the difference.

Philosophical Interpretation

Augustine's formula has shaped Christian political theology more than any other single sentence. Its deepest claim is that political realities are spiritual before they are institutional: what a city loves determines what it becomes, and the form of government matters less than the ordering of the heart. A tyranny and a democracy can both be earthly cities — both can be ordered by the love of self, by the will to power and possession, regardless of their institutional form. And a poor community and an empire can both be the City of God — both can be ordered by the love of God, by the will to serve and to give, regardless of their circumstances. This insight has been taken up by the Augustinian tradition in Christian political thought, from the medieval two-swords theory to the Reformed two-kingdoms doctrine to the modern Christian realist suspicion of earthly power in Reinhold Niebuhr. The formula is also a critique of any political utopianism that expects the earthly city to become the heavenly one. Augustine insists that the two cities are interwoven, not separable, and that no political arrangement will bring the earthly city to an end. The earthly city will persist, in some form, until the end; the task of the Christian is to live as a citizen of the City of God within the earthly city, not to confuse the two.

The Order of Love

Augustine's account of the two cities is rooted in his ethics of love. For Augustine, the moral life is a matter of right ordering: the loves that constitute the self must be ordered toward their proper objects, and the highest object is God. Sin is not, for Augustine, the love of evil things — the things we love in sin are usually good things (power, pleasure, security) — but the disordered love of good things: loving a good thing as if it were the highest good, which is to love it in the place of God. The earthly city is the community of those whose love is disordered in this way — who love self, power, and glory as if they were the highest good, and who therefore are willing to disregard the true highest good. The City of God is the community of those whose love is rightly ordered — who love the good things of creation as gifts of God, and who love God as the giver and the good that exceeds all gifts. The two cities are, in this sense, two forms of love: two ways of relating to the good, one ordered and one disordered.

Legacy

The two-cities formula has echoed through fifteen centuries of Christian thought. It gave the medieval church its language for the distinction of spiritual and temporal power. It gave the Reformation its account of the two kingdoms. It gave the Enlightenment its target, in the charge that Augustine devalued the earthly city and so undermined the possibility of political improvement. And it gives the modern Christian realist tradition its deepest insight: that political arrangements cannot save, that the earthly city is always the earthly city, and that the task of the citizen of the City of God is to act within the earthly city without illusions about its nature. The formula is also a wisdom about the human heart: we become what we love, and a community becomes what its members love most. The deepest practical question the formula raises is the one Augustine asked of Rome: what does this city love, and what is it becoming because of it?

The Deeper Lesson

The deepest lesson of Augustine's formula is that the deepest realities are spiritual before they are institutional. The form of government matters, but the ordering of the heart matters more. A city of citizens whose love is ordered toward the good of others — toward justice, mercy, and the common good — will be a different city, whatever its institutions, than a city of citizens whose love is ordered toward themselves. And the ordering of the heart is not a political achievement but a spiritual one: it is the work of grace, of education, of worship, of the disciplines that form the loves that form the citizens that form the city. The wisdom of Augustine's formula is the wisdom of seeing the spiritual root of the political tree — and of refusing to confuse the pruning of institutions with the healing of the heart.

Relations

This quote is the central formula of Augustine's theology of history and his political philosophy, and it has shaped Christian thought on the relation of the spiritual and the temporal ever since. It belongs to Augustine, connects to his account of sin as disordered love, and anticipates the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the sacred in its insistence that the deepest realities are defined by what we love.

Sources

1. "Augustine." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
2. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God against the Pagans. Translated by R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Book XIV, Chapter 28.
3. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Book XIV, Chapter 28.