City of God: An Abridged Version

No book except the Bible itself had a greater influence on the Middle Ages than The City of God. And since medieval Europe was the cradle of modern Western society, this work is vital for understanding our world and how it came into being. St. Augustine is probably the most influential Christian thinker after St. Paul, and this book is his masterpiece, a vast synthesis of religious and secular knowledge. It began as a reply to the charge that Christian other-wordliness was causing the decline of the Roman Empire. Augustine produced a wealth of evidence to prove that paganism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Then he proceeded to his larger theme, a cosmic interpretation of history in terms of the struggle between good and evil: the City of God in conflict with the Earthly City or the City of the Devil. This, the first serious attempt at a philosophy of history, was to have incalculable influence in forming the Western mind on the relations of Church and State and on the Christian's place in the temporal order. The original City of God contained twenty-two books and fills three regular-sized volumes. This edition has been skillfullly abridged for the intelligent general reader by Vernon J. Bourke, author of Augustine's Quest for Wisdom. The heart of this monumental work is now available to a much wider audience.