Augustine Answers Rome's Fall With Two Cities
Alaric's Visigoths sack Rome, pagans blame the Christians, and a North African bishop writes the rebuttal
Quick facts
- Rome sacked by
- Alaric and the Visigoths, August 410 CE
- Author
- Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
- Written
- 413-426 CE
- Central argument
- Two cities: earthly (self-love) and heavenly (God-love)
What happened
When Alaric's Visigoths sacked Rome in August 410 CE, the first time the city had fallen to a foreign army in nearly eight hundred years, critics blamed the disaster on Rome's abandonment of its old gods for Christianity. Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, spent over a decade, from 413 to 426 CE, answering that charge in The City of God, arguing that two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly city by love of self carried to contempt of God, and the heavenly city by love of God carried to contempt of self. Augustine argued the earthly city, built on human glory and power, was inherently unstable and prone to the wars and conflict that had always afflicted it long before Christianity existed, while the heavenly city's citizens lived as strangers within earthly kingdoms, bound instead to an eternal home outside history's fluctuations.
Why it matters
The City of God separated Christian identity from the fate of any specific earthly power, including Rome itself, an argument that let Christianity survive intellectually and institutionally as the Western Roman Empire collapsed around it over the following decades, and it became one of the most influential works of Christian political thought for the next fifteen centuries.
How we know
The City of God survives complete in the manuscript tradition and is one of Augustine's best-attested works, along with his Confessions, both preserved and copied continuously since late antiquity.
Sources
- Internet History Sourcebooks Project, Fordham University. Augustine: The City of God · Primary source (author-declared)sourcebooks.fordham.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Sack of Rome 410 CE · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- Ancient Rome → · The sack of Rome in 410 CE and the empire's final decades in the west are covered in the Ancient Rome timeline.