The City of God: Volume I IV: Books I-VII: 1

Volume I (Books I-VII). Augustine turns back the charge against the Christians, and shows that the gods of Rome had secured the city neither from earthly disaster nor in the hope of the life to come.Thirteen years in the writing, and the largest work of Augustine's life, The City of God was begun in 413, three years after the Goths sacked Rome, and finished in 426. The pagans had blamed the fall of the eternal city on the Christian faith; Augustine answered them, and out of that answer built a defence of Christianity that grows into a history and a philosophy of the whole human race. Its theme is the two cities - the earthly, founded on the love of self, and the heavenly, founded on the love of God - whose intertwined course runs from the fall of the angels to the resurrection of the dead. This Sanctified Souls Press edition sets the complete text of all twenty-two Books in the classic translation of Marcus Dods (1871), in four volumes.