Saint Augustine's City of God Against the Pagans

St. Augustine, a scholar who lived from 352 – 430 AD, was deeply religious. In his account of the world he marks three different phases of humankind: the Eden (innocent), the World (damned), the After (blessed/damned). The After represents a division, which is begun here on Earth, of the world into two cities, that of God and that of Men. This division is at the heart of St Augustine’s philosophy, for it follows from the original and cardinal sin of man, pride. In Augustine’s mind, after the questions of eternal pre-time, the creation of the world and historical age, comes the basis for the present world’s structure, God’s creation of free-willed man and woman. In addition to the properties that humans share with stones, trees and beasts, God gave intellectual life, “in common with the angels alone.” This life was set amongst Eden in accordance with God’s laws. This epitomized perfection, where everything ran in perfect harmony, from the smallest flowers to angels and men. Adam and Eve had only one restriction, a single tree to be left alone. Was the tree itself of symbolic import? Did it contain some special property that gave knowledge of Good and Evil, or did the unlucky Malus Rosaceae simply draw the vertically-challenged straw, being picked as instrument of a law that existed before it? Perhaps it is of little import except in the aesthetic history of forbidden fruit and fig leaf symbology. Regardless, it was the apple tree that was eaten from, but it was pride that felled the world. For Eve and Adam to eat the fruit was the division of the two cities; those who lived by God’s laws and those who, “selfwilled”, lived by their own. Pride becomes representative of living by one’s own laws, thinking oneself better than God, with “an appetite for a perverse kind of elevation.” Pain and suffering are the punishment, but the soul is not forsaken completely. If we lift up our hearts to the lord in obedience and humility, we will belong to the City of God and be saved. “There is in humility something which exalts the mind, and something in exaltation which abases it.” Exaltation is a vice because it’s pleasure is of and for man, therefore is not a subjection to the Lord. This, historically, represented a problem for many devout men, who saw the arts, especially music, as treading a fine line between worship and sin, for music is pleasurable as an end in itself and often sees a loss of bodily control. This fear echoes Augustine’s belief that the misalignment of sexual/bodily desire and that of the mind was part of the consequence of eating from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Interestingly, Augustine was quite the strumpet in his earlier life, with a mistress and much sexual sin, which is perhaps why it was a major thread in his philosophy.

Ah, cute.