The City of God: Volume III IV: Books XV-XIX: 3

Volume III (Books XV-XIX). The two cities are followed through the whole course of sacred history, from Cain and Abel to the prophets, and brought at last to their ends: the supreme good and the true peace of the city of God.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.