The Sack of Rome and Augustine’s City of God

Alaric, king of the Goths, had fought for the emperor Theodosius and afterwards turned against the empire (Socrates, Church History 7.10). He was a Christian, as Orosius stresses (Orosius, History against the Pagans 7.37.17); Sozomen links him with the Arian party among the Goths (Sozomen, Church History 9.9). He besieged Rome more than once: Jerome, at Bethlehem, heard that the citizens had first bought their lives with gold and had then been besieged again, until famine drove them to eat human flesh (Jerome, Letter 127.12).

In August 410 the Goths entered the city, plundered it, and left on the third day (Prosper, Chronicle 1240 (AD 410)) (Orosius, History against the Pagans 7.39). Two Christian writers, both arguing against pagan critics, stress their restraint. Orosius says that Alaric ordered those who took refuge in holy places, above all the basilicas of Peter and Paul, to be left unharmed, and tells how church plate found by a Goth was carried back to St Peter’s in procession under guard (Orosius, History against the Pagans 7.39). Augustine of Hippo likewise says that the churches of the apostles sheltered Christians and pagans alike, while granting that there was slaughter, burning and looting as in any captured city (Augustine, City of God 1.1) (Augustine, City of God 1.7). Jerome’s account of the aged widow Marcella shows both sides: soldiers beat her for gold she did not have, then took her to the basilica of Paul; she died a few days later (Jerome, Letter 127.13–14). Socrates adds that many senators were killed and great buildings burned (Socrates, Church History 7.10).

The shock was felt far away. “The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken,” Jerome wrote, and again that “the whole world perished in one city”; refugees who had been rich arrived destitute at his monastery (Jerome, Letter 127.12) (Jerome, Preface to the Commentary on Ezekiel, books 1, 3 and 7).

Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius, met a different response. In his own later account, worshippers of the many gods blamed the fall of Rome on the Christian religion and blasphemed the true God more bitterly than before, and for that reason he began to write the City of God. The work occupied him for years and grew to twenty-two books: ten against those who hold that the gods must be worshipped for the sake of this life or the next, and twelve on the origin, course and appointed ends of two cities (Augustine, Retractations 2.43). He defines the two by what they love: “the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self” (Augustine, City of God 14.28).

His answer starts from that distinction. The city of God, he writes in the preface, sojourns in this world as a stranger, while the earthly city, though mistress of the nations, is itself ruled by its lust for rule (Augustine, City of God 1, preface).