Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 101, Against the Pagans.

This is the first of two episodes on St. Augustine's City of God, the full title of which

is concerning the City of God against the Pagans. The City of God, a nearly 1,100-page monolith

of late antique theology written between 413 and 427, historically marks the ascendancy

of Roman Catholicism as a religion and the death knell of Rome, or at least the western

half of the empire. In a sentence, the City of God explains the tribulations of Augustine's

Christian contemporaries, attempts a revisionist history of the entire world with Augustine's

own religion being the final outcome of all the world's events, defends the Old Testament's

narratives as literally true, and works through many of the major questions of Christian theology,

not definitively answered by the Bible, how salvation works, what free will is, how Satan and

evil came to be, and the nature of heaven and hell. While long parts of the City of God are

carefully organized multi-chapter discussions, the book also frequently meanders from topic

to topic as its author sees fit. As Scholar G. R. Evans writes at the outset of the Penguin

edition, the City of God can be thought of as, quote, an old man's book, close quote,

that sometimes rambling but always forceful magnum opus of a churchman trying to compress

his ideology over a period of 14 years into a single, vast volume. The scope and ambition

of the City of God make it quite a challenging work for modern readers. While as a stylist,

Augustine is generally marvelously clear, he wrote the treaties in his 60s and early 70s

after an unusually bookish life. The City of God draws on Augustine's experience as

a student of history, a reader of philosophy, and a former adherent of ideologies other than

Christianity. If we open the book expecting pure Catholic theology, we find ourselves

surprised by the amount of other content that the book deals with, a great deal on the

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