Augustine’s Apocalypse – and our own.
By Peter J Leithart, First Things.
Composed in the aftermath of the Visigoth sack of Rome, Augustine’s City of God seems to have everything you need for a summer blockbuster, all four horsemen at full gallop. Augustine recounts the “devastation, slaughter, looting, burning and affliction” of Rome’s “recent calamity.” He gives careful attention to the damnable outrage of rape, seeing it as an expression of the lust for domination that is the ethos of the city of man and assuring Christian women they aren’t defiled by another’s sin. His subject promises buckets of blood, fire, and vapor of smoke; sword, famine, and pestilence galore.
Yet those looking for prurient detail of slaughter and mayhem will be disappointed. Augustine doesn’t avert his gaze, but neither does he indulge the lust of his eyes, or offer spectacles to dazzle the lustful eyes of his readers. Nor, notably, does he lament Rome’s end. In Augustine there’s nothing like Jerome’s famous cri de coeur in his commentary on Ezekiel: “when the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated . . . the whole world perished in one city. Who would believe that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, had collapsed, that the mother of all nations became their tomb?” Augustine is certain Rome’s end isn’t the end.
Augustine isn’t even surprised Rome has fallen. Instead of enumerating disasters, he exposes the causes, as if he saw it coming, in part to prove that it had nothing to do with the spread of Christianity. The atrocities Rome suffered weren’t unique but accorded with the “customs of war.”
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