this is a wonderful summary.  i merely add a couple of nuances.

>Augustine's City of God is a magisterial and extended
>philosophical/theological theodicy in which he separates secular history
>from sacred history. It is also an intensive treatment on the limits of
>human reason to transcend the human condition. Sacred history is
>impenetrable to human reason except as revealed by God; secular history
>(including the history of the post-Pentecostal church), although relevant to
>the Divine plan, appears to human beings as one damned thing after another
>without rhyme or reason. The City of God is divided into 2 parts: A)
>Apologetic (Books I X)-- a devastating 

this adj is in the eye of the beholder.  if i were an advocate who wanted to
prosecute xnty for responsibility for the fall of rome, i wd use the first ten
chapters of the CoG as my primary evidence, even tho augustine meant it as a
defense of xnty.  his attitudes, all good xn ones, do not sound very good from
the perspective of a good roman -- eg, don't make such a stink, they only
sacked Rome for three days, it's God's punishment anyway which we shd bear in
patience as a reproval for our sins, and some of the people who fled to
church's were spared, and at least the marauding goths were xns -- it wd have
been worse if they had been pagans, etc.  

>critique of ancient political
>theory/practice and historiography, and B) Thetic (Books XI-XXII). The
>latter is subdivided into 3 parts: 1) The origin of the two cities (Books
>XI-XIV); 2) The history of the two cities (Books XV-XVIII); and 3) The end
>of the two cities (Books XIX-XXII). Book XIX is Augustine's teleology and
>discusses the limited goals possible of attainment for temporal
>institutions, including the church, versus the transcendental goals of the
>two cities. Book XX is his eschatology.

including one of the most astounding exegetical pirouettes in recorded history,
where the millennium is shifted from an awaited period of perfection on earth
into an already-in-progress, but invisible on earth, kingdom in heaven.

> It is important to note that no
>temporal institutions, including the church and empire, correspond to either
>of the two cities. These institutions are a corpus mixtum made up of the
>saved and the damned, and there is no way of knowing for certain who
>(including ourselves) is a member of which city. And given what Augustine
>has to say about the limitations of the finite creature to know and
>understand the infinite/transcendent (see Book XII [?] on the difference
>between finitude and infinity), it is not surprising that he denied all
>knowledge of when the Final Judgement will occur. Thus, for Augustine, life
>since the Pentecost is one long Middle Ages, the end of which we know not
>when. In the meantime, life from our perspective appears as one damned thing
>after another signifying nothing. 

this is what i call agnostic asceticism -- a radical renunciation of assigning
prophetic meaning to history.  it prefigures some modern secular attitudes in
quite striking ways, but it seems to have been way beyond the reach of
augustine's fellow xns.  even his own "student" Orosius, assigned to write an
augustinian history, cd not adhere to this agnostic position.

>All we can do is have faith that at the
>level of the transcendent our experiences do indeed have meaning. The locus
>classicus of all this is R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the
>Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge, 1970). Augustine's views won out in
>large measure because of the power and cogency of his argument.

here's where i differ significantly.  augustine won posthumously because he was
right (ie everyone who fell into the temptation to read history prophetically
and announce the End for their own day (what i call apocalyptic believers) were
wrong.  those who said the fall of rome signalled the end (the phenomenon that
prompted the book in the first place), were wrong.  the issue for the
historian, hv, is not who was right, but who carried weight at any given time. 
what seems like a powerful and cogent argument 1600 years later may have struck
many contemporaries as a state of utter denial.  i suspect that far more people
followed apocalyptic bishops like hesychius of salonika than the austere
agnosticism of augustine (see Augustine, Epp.197-199).  

Arquillere wrote a book called "augustinisme politique" about people who
misread augustine to argue that the church, or the xn empire *was* the city of
god.  marrou and mommsen both wrote pieces on orosius' misunderstandings which
one might call augustinisme historiographique, and i've argued that in the
carolingian period, eschatology is dominated by a school i call augustinisme
chronologique (ie they take the mnl kingdom which exists invisibly in the city
of god to be coming to an end in the year 1000 or 1033, a position augustine
explicitly denounced).

rlandes
>Mike
>
>



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