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Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II: City of God: Cha...

City of GodNicene and Post-Nicene FathersSt. Augustine

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This is a chapter from Augustine's *City of God* (Book V), a work of Christian apologetics and philosophy of history written in the early fifth century. The chapter argues that Rome's imperial expansion was granted by the Christian God as a reward for Roman civic virtue — specifically the Romans' intense love of glory, honor, and liberty — rather than through pagan worship or fate, both of which Augustine has refuted in preceding chapters. Drawing heavily on the historian Sallust and the poet Virgil, Augustine characterizes Roman greatness as the achievement of a virtuous few driven by honorable ambition, contrasted with the corruption of later Romans who pursued the same ends through fraud and luxury. His distinctively double-edged verdict is that Roman virtue was genuine but incomplete: love of glory is closer to true virtue than avarice, yet it still falls short because it is directed toward human judgment rather than toward God — making Rome's achievement a kind of morally instructive lesser good. Augustine also insists, against idealized readings of Roman history, that virtuous Romans were always a small minority amid chronic class conflict and moral failure, and that the republic's greatness depended on the wisdom of a capable few rather than collective civic health. The chapter thus serves Augustine's larger thesis that earthly political glory, however admirable on its own terms, cannot substitute for the divine end that alone constitutes true virtue.

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II: City of God: Cha...

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