I'm John Batchel with Professor Catherine Honebeer, Brynmark College. Her new book is Augustine

the African. This is St. Augustine. St. Augustino is the Italians call him. His mother,

probably part Berber, maybe all barber, but we don't know. In other words, he's both of Africa

and of the Roman Empire.

And his response to the sacking of Rome and also the ability of Augustine to be a teacher,

he starts writing a book about this time about a guidebook for Christians.

But that takes in many years.

The city of God is the big construction, and perhaps it's Rome, perhaps it's the future.

Catherine, your explanation made me think that we're not sure it could have been many things

because he wrote it over many years. What was his initial intention for writing?

He had a very precise initial intention, and it looked back to the sacking of Rome in August 410

and the influx of refugees to North Africa.

Several of those refugees were grumbling that Rome had only been

sacked because of what they called Tempora Christiana, the Christian times in which they lived.

And they argued that if Rome had not abandoned its old gods for the Christian God, then the sack would

never have happened. And so Augustine begins his work, the city of God, to prove to these

grumblers that Rome has always been endangered.

It's always been subject to sack and to outside attack,

that Roman history is not as glorious as they pretend,

and Roman gods are not as glorious as they pretend, and there's no way they can blame

the Christian change in the empire for what has happened to Rome. And that's the first 10 books

of the city of God, written in intense anger to justify the existence of the Christian Empire to the people who were murmuring against it.

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