City of God

Written in the early fifth century after the sack of Rome in 410, this theological treatise answers pagans who blamed Christianity for the city's fall. Augustine distinguishes the earthly city, organized around self-love and temporal power, from the City of God, organized around love of God and destined beyond history. He reviews Roman religion and philosophy, biblical history from Creation through Israel to Christ, and the last things. The argument is not a narrative of one life but a long defence of Christian time against classical civic religion. It is doctrine and historiography together: why empires rise and fall, and what kind of community the church is.

Bound in brown cloth blocked with a design by Joe McLaren. Metallic pale brown slipcase with pasted paper side printed with detail from an illuminated manuscript.