Augustine's Response To The City Of God

Augustine places his response to the Fall of Rome in his most influential exposition, The City of God. The origin of The City of God starts out with creation, and Augustine shows how God’s final goal is to return man to his original state of perfection and complete the City of God with heaven. God uses many instruments throughout history to achieve his ultimate goal of bringing men back to the garden and into the City of God, one of them being war. Consequently, Augustine provides a detailed exposition about how even though God brings about the Fall of Rome, he is still patient with the Romans who lead sinful lives. In The City of God, Augustine proposes that God is fully in control of man’s circumstances. Augustine concludes that God sometimes allows situations to take place to show his sovereignty and providence because God is faithful and just to complete what he has started. In The City of God, Augustine arrives at the conclusion that God, The Divine Providence, uses war to draw sinful men to Himself. As previously stated, God’s sole purpose and main goal is to restore man back to the City of God. Thus, even during times of war, God is at work in the lives of the enemy. “Yet, if they only had sense, they would see that the hardships and cruelties they suffered from the enemy came from that Divine Providence …show more content…
Through the Fall of Rome, people become aware that their lives are not assured of and that just as Rome fell, their lives too could end at any moment. Thus, through this calamity, people desperately seek truth and find it in God. "Yet, you owe your survival to that God who, in sparing you, warned you to amend your lives by penance" (Augustine, 63). God could have completely wiped out the Romans just as He did with the Canaanites, however, God spared the lives of the Romans and used the Fall of Rome to warn the Romans to