The church was, thus, the City of God.Īugustine deliberately imitated Plato in working out his ideal city, and combined the philosophy of Plato with the doctrines of Cicero and with the theology of the Christian religion. By this he meant not only Heaven, to which the Christians looked forward as their eternal home, but also its counterpart on earth composed of the body of true believers. He then turned from the earthly to the spiritual city. The tone of this part of the work is aggressively apologetic. He attacked paganism, traced Roman history to show that the old gods had not saved Rome from misfortune, and argued that Christianity, if adopted generally by people and rulers, would save the state. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, spent thirteen years in preparing his City of God the most influential book written in the fifth century. 410, those who adhered to the pagan beliefs attributed the fall of Rome to the fact that the government had abandoned the old worship and adopted Christianity. When the city of Rome was sacked by the Goths in A.D. The work of Augustine embodies the transition from the classical world, about to pass away, to the world of Christendom from the period of hostility between the church and a pagan state to the period of unity in a Christian church-state. 354-430) belong to the period of the Church Fathers just considered, and represent in the main the same point of view, they contained several ideas that demand special attention.
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