You MUST Read This Church Father

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Why has no one seriously told me to read The City of God? It It is It is one of the best books I think I've ever read.

[00:00:07]And I've read a fair chunk, and it's mind-blowingly good.

[00:00:11]Stick around and watch this video.

[00:00:23]>> [music] >> Hey guys, welcome to the channel. In this video, I'm going to be talking about three of the themes in Augustine's City of God, and make sure you hit like and subscribe. This is what to expect in the video. A brief background, God's providence, the nature of evil, and then the Eucharist. And so, let's begin with the background. Now, The City of God was born out of a great shock, right? In the 410, the Visigoths sacked Rome, and it was unthinkable. This is the eternal city, the the city that wasn't built in a day, in smoke, defeated.

[00:01:00]And what happened was the pagans blamed Christianity.

[00:01:04]See, abandoning the old gods provoked it. By rejecting the gods for Jesus, the Roman gods are now mad, and so they have allowed the Visigoths to destroy the city of Rome. And so, Augustine writes The City of God to answer this problem, and he doesn't really deny the horror of Rome's fall, but he seeks to reframe it.

[00:01:24]And he says that earthly cities rise and fall, and when they collapse, it reveals their sin. And only the City of God endures forever, and it's by grace.

[00:01:36]You see, Augustine insisted that every earthly city is built on the love of self, and therefore it's doomed to fall to judgments, and only the City of God endures forever. It's grounded in God's unchanging love, and I think it also shares kinship with Jesus' teaching on the kingdom of God, which, you know, transcends every earthly power.

[00:01:58]And both emphasize the true city is not of this world. And yet, it's already breaking into this world by grace until it awaits final vindication upon the return of Christ.

[00:02:11]Now, the fall of Rome was the collapse of the greatest civilization the world had ever known. You know, monuments, wealth, glory, power, everything reduced to nothing.

[00:02:22]It was really hard for Augustine to stomach and difficult for everyone. And so, Augustine takes up his pen and begins to write. And it really is a marvelous read. It is It is absolutely one of the best books that I've ever read in my life. So, please, if you take anything away from this video, make sure you go and read The City of God. This is the edition that I recommend.

[00:02:45]And I want to focus on three areas in particular. Firstly, God's providence.

[00:02:50]Now, Augustine understands providence as God's control of the history books. And God administers temporal blessings and sufferings. And he does it for pastoral purposes.

[00:03:01]So, his early views on suffering were forged by his debates with the Manichaeans. They understood suffering to be dualistic, a battle between good and evil forces. And in response, Augustine said that God creates and rules all things.

[00:03:16]And sometimes it's really hard, isn't it, to see the goodness of pain and suffering?

[00:03:20]Um It's really, really hard, actually.

[00:03:22]But But Augustine says we can see it when we sort of take a step back and then look at the big picture.

[00:03:27]And so, in book 11, section 18, Augustine writes, "For God could never have created any, I do not say angel, but even man, whose future wickedness he foreknew, unless he had equally known to what uses on behalf of the good he could turn it."

[00:03:43]And Augustine affirms God's sovereignty over suffering. The greatest form of suffering is sin itself. You see, God punished Adam and Eve by giving them over to themselves and we're now bound to a sin direction.

[00:03:56]We're enslaved to sin and that's the direction, that's the path that we choose. And so in book 14, section 15, Augustine says in the punishment of that sin, the retribution for disobedience was simply disobedience itself.

[00:04:10]For what is man's misery if not his own disobedience to himself with the result that because he would not do what he could he now cannot do what he would.

[00:04:22]And so for Augustine, God doesn't cause people to sin. He's not the author of sin and yet he causes people to do good.

[00:04:29]And so there's an asymmetry with goodness and evil. Those who fall fall by their own will even though as Augustine just says there, they can't actually choose the good.

[00:04:39]But it's their own fault.

[00:04:41]But those who stand stand by God's grace.

[00:04:44]And temporal forms of suffering reflect God's rule as well. And so Augustine will speak of God permitting evil including the evil actions of individuals. In other cases, Augustine uses more active language. And he claims God will inflict temporal evil on people not just letting it sort of happen.

[00:05:04]And what you find is God sends suffering to believers and unbelievers. And so it's not just like he sends easy gifts to Christians and then fire and brimstone to unbelievers.

[00:05:15]He actually sends difficulty to both.

[00:05:16]And for Augustine, what separates the two is how they respond to suffering.

[00:05:22]See, the sack of Rome should actually spur Christians on rather than hampering them or creating despair or disillusionment. Uh it should spur Christians on to seek eternal goods. And if you want to see more of this, then I'd encourage you to read book one, parts eight and nine.

[00:05:40]But it's really really helpful in just grasping some of the theology of providence in you know in what sense God is sovereign. Augustine is actually really pastoral who helps us in our own circumstances and you can see it's not an accident. Nothing. You know, the cancer that you have is not an accident.

[00:05:56]The bad things that have happened are not an accident. Even if it's really difficult. Even if it doesn't make sense to us right now and it's really painful and really hard. Augustine helps us to see there is an ultimate good that God is bringing through the suffering that we face today. And so even so so sort of picture it sort of like a a tapestry. On this side of the tapestry it looks like a whole load of knots and randomness and mess and chaos. That's often how our lives feel.

[00:06:23]But if you were to turn that tapestry the the other way around, you would then see the beautiful picture, the portrait that God is is crafting. And so that's how Augustine understands the providence of God. It's really pastoral and really really helpful. It's all the way through the book.

[00:06:39]Secondly, the nature of evil.

[00:06:42]See, Augustine's understanding of evil was central to his mind in his writings.

[00:06:49]As a Manichaean he had a dualistic concept. The material world was bad and there's this cosmic battle in the ring, you know, the red and the blue between good and evil and they're pretty much sort of equal and opposite powers.

[00:07:02]And The Confessions spells out how the Neoplatonists help Augustine and he ends up seeing evil as privation and as an absence of the good.

[00:07:12]See, for Augustine God is the ultimate being. The I am who I am. God is not a being among others but being itself and that means God doesn't have being, he is being. And he's also ultimate goodness. And so all created things then participate in God's own being. You know, nothing exists outside of that participation. Nothing can exist outside of God. In him we live and move and have our being. Acts 17 I think it is.

[00:07:38]So nothing exists outside of participation.

[00:07:41]And so for God being and goodness are identical. To affirm God as ultimate being is to affirm God as ultimate goodness. And what I want you to see here are the implications.

[00:07:53]When we turn to the created order, everything that exists must be good since all things participate in God's being and goodness.

[00:08:02]Now, that doesn't mean that everything participates in God in the same way. You have inanimate things like rocks or animate things like trees or sentient things like non-human animals and then rational things like humans and angels.

[00:08:16]And so, given all of this, evil can't relate to creation in the same way as goodness. See, goodness corresponds to being, evil is a distortion of being. Evil's not a substance but a perversion of substance.

[00:08:29]And so, goodness is the the stuff of creation and evil is more like a parasite, a corruption, a notness.

[00:08:38]Some people describe it as uh sort of a little bit like darkness. It's not anything positive, it's just the absence of light.

[00:08:47]And this shapes Augustine's narrative from books 10 to 22. And he says, "Look, since the tree of knowledge of good and evil was created by God, it can't be evil."

[00:08:57]Uh and and he also says there's no there's no way to to trace out a cause for evil.

[00:09:02]He says we do that in vain. People always ask that question, don't they?

[00:09:05]Whence comes evil? But that's that's a vain question because evil is a privation. And the place where Augustine deals with this in any kind of depth is in book 14 and section 11. I encourage you to read the whole section. It's really really helpful. This is one bit.

[00:09:21]He says, "Evil things are overcome by good things. This is in fact so true that although evil things are allowed to exist in order to show how the creator's all-foreseeing justice can use even these things for the good, good things can exist without the evil. But evil things cannot exist without the good.

[00:09:38]What is more evil is eliminated not by removing the nature which which it had entered or by removing any part of that nature, but rather by healing and rectifying the nature that had become vitiated and depraved.

[00:09:52]Now, if you read The City of God, you soon discover that for Augustine, evil isn't an illusion.

[00:09:57]Uh it's not It's not like it, you know, we we we're ransacked by evil in our lives, aren't we? Uh you know, just switch on the news, flick on your phone, you see it everywhere.

[00:10:06]But the concept of privation is more of a tool to conceptualize the relationship between God and creation.

[00:10:13]And I don't know about you, but I find this really philosophically satisfying.

[00:10:17]It's a really good way to answer the skeptics when they bring up the problem of evil and they want to talk about how God is able to create evil, how evil can even exist, I recommend using St. Augustine's model. Talk about how it's a privation rather than as a positive thing that exists in God.

[00:10:35]So, that's Augustine's treatment of evil, and then finally his treatment of the Eucharist.

[00:10:42]I'll be honest, this bit has sort of caught me off guard because it comes up in book 10 and it's on the nature of worship. And Augustine is talking about how we can discern between a demon and an angel. And he says that a demon will make you worship it, but an angel will direct you to the worship of God. And he talks about sacrifice. And in section six, he says the true sacrifice then is every act done in order that we might cling to God in holy fellowship. That is every act which is referred to the final good in which we can be truly blessed.

[00:11:15]You know, this kind of shocked me because I'd expect him to say the true sacrifice is the Eucharist. Right?

[00:11:21]That's the language of the Catholic apologists online.

[00:11:24]But it's not where Augustine initially goes. He talks more about the sacrifice of our bodies that we offer to God. He writes this. He says, "The soul becomes a sacrifice when it directs itself to God so that a flame with the fire of love for him, it loses the form of worldly desire and now subject to him is reformed to him as to an unchanging form, thus pleasing him by receiving its beauty from his beauty."

[00:11:50]And this is the city of God in its purest sense. All right, the city of God is concerned with the true worship of God. That is a mark of the city of God.

[00:11:59]And the city of man, in contrast to that, is concerned with the worship of self.

[00:12:06]But here in section six, there is a moment where Augustine mentions the Eucharist.

[00:12:10]He writes, "This is the sacrifice of Christians, although many one body in Christ.

[00:12:16]And this is the sacrifice that the church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar, which is well known to the faithful, where it is made plain to her that in the offering she makes, she herself is offered."

[00:12:28]Now, this is a famous section and it might appear that the Eucharist is second to the sacrifice that is we ourselves, the language Augustine uses in the section.

[00:12:37]Uh but for Augustine, the Eucharist represents the sacrifice of the body of Christ. And so even we even say actually in section 20, where he says, "The sacrifice offered by the church is the daily sacrament of his sacrifice, in which the church learns to offer its very self through him." And so it seems that it seems a bit complicated, doesn't it? But really for Augustine here, unity is key, the connection between the oneness of the body and of Christ the head, uh the unity of of the church when it comes to the Eucharist, which kind of makes sense given the Donatist controversy. Ag- Augustine will say the benefits of the Eucharist don't extend to any who are outside the great church. You need to be connected to the one, united, holy, Catholic, apostolic church in order to receive the Eucharist.

[00:13:25]Now, Augustine is a complicated figure on the Lord's Supper, right? Because on the one hand, he'll say in sermon 228, "Recognizing the bread what hung on the cross and the cup that flowed from his side." In sermon 229, he says, "This bread and wine, when the word is applied to it, becomes the body and blood of the word."

[00:13:45]And so, it's a really high view of the Eucharist. And then, he'll say in his homily on John, "The bread refers to the grace of the sacraments, not the sacrament that we can see, to those who eat inwardly, not outwardly, who eat in the heart, not just chew with the teeth." He even says this, "Jesus was not offering helpings of his body to be finished off in mouthfuls."

[00:14:06]And so, Augustine's view of the Eucharist is fairly complicated and it's debated to this day. Uh this video isn't ultimately on that, but I just thought I would share that because I think it's fairly interesting and it's some of the stuff that you will discover if you read The City of God.

[00:14:21]So, there we go. I just wanted to pick three themes in The City of God for us to chew on and hopefully it gives you food for thought as well. Let me know your own experience with The City of God. Tell me some of your favorite themes and if you want to see more videos like this, let me know. I can do some more of the themes of The City of God at a later date. So, God bless you.

[00:14:40]Semper Soli Deo vide. See you next time.