Augustine’s “City of God”: A Reader’s Guide by Gerard O’Daly (review)

146 BOOK REVIEWS Augustine's "City of God": A Reader's Guide. By GERARD O'DALY. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. 323. $85.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-826354-6. Gerard O'Daly, professor of Latin at University College London and a member of the editorial board of the Augustinus Lexicon, has written a brief and thoughtful introduction to Augustine's magnum opus et arduum. Aptly subtitled, in just under three hundred pages this book not only offers a helpful overview of the lengthy work, but (perhaps more importantly) also defines the context within which the text is to be understood. The first several chapters are helpful in establishing context, and the first and third could stand alone as essays in their own right. The first treats the theme of the "city" of Rome in late antiquity, as a means of gauging Augustine's use of this idea. This chapterserves incidentally as a bibliographical essay on more recent trends and approaches in the field of late antique history. In particular, O'Daly examines the topos of city in four writers: Ammianus, Symmachus, Claudian, and Prudentius. He demonstrates both how each exploited the understanding of Rome shared among members of late antique culture and how each author shaped the contours of this topos for his own literary, political, or theological purposes. While this endeavor involves some "reconstruction," O'Daly is convincing, at least insofar as he offers a glimpse at how the sensibilities of the age operated; it is out of this common set of assumptions about the "city" that Augustine would offer his own vision. O'Daly's analysis (24-26) ofAugustine's correspondence with Nectarius, which antedates the writing of De civitate Dei by several years, shows the degree to which Augustine could engage these assumptions-and, at the same time, transform them. The second chapter offers a brief overview of the circumstances that elicited a work such as De civitate Dei from Augustine, noting that it is undeniable that the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 provided the impetus for its composition (31). However, as O'Daly points out, as psychologically arresting as the sack of 410 was, the stability of Roma aeterna was in question prior to that date. Alaric had been in Italy since around 400, and there were calls to renew the pagan cult prior to the fall of Rome. Christians like Jerome were terrified by the events of 410, largely, O'Daly contends, due to their Eusebian sensibilities. They had so tied the spread of Christianity to the success of the Empire that the fall of Rome itself raised fears about the continued stability of the faith. Thus O'Daly wisely asserts that "Augustine's overriding aim is to dissociate Rome's historical destiny from that of Christianity, or any religion" (29). He does a fine job of demonstrating how Augustine's sermons of 410-11 reflect these and similar concerns, and equally how Augustine himself was in the BOOK REVIEWS 147 process of modifying his earlier optimism about the possibilities of a Christian Empire. Further, in terms of the intended audience, O'Daly is careful to point out that, while the work is certainly apologetic, its scope was not simply the refutation of pagan opponents of Christianity. In fact, its principal audience seems to have been Christians-and those on the fringes of Christianity (such as Volusianus)-who might have found themselves somewhat "unhinged" by recent events and the response these events elicited from their pagan contemporaries. Thus, there is more to the work than simply apology contra paganos. De civitate Dei was written as much to bolster Augustine's fellow Christians as to challenge their pagan critics. O'Daly notes that the depth and range of topics treated in the work reveal its hortatory and catechetical dimensions, though he later suggests the perils of trying to separate the catechetical and apologetic purposes of the work (271). The range and theological vision are what distinguish De civitate Dei and signal its lasting importance. O'Daly concludes his second chapter by addressing the possibility (based on an inference from one of the Divjak letters) that Augustine had revised the text, perhaps repeatedly. He...