Augustine, Rome, and New Testament eschatology

Partly in response to a recent question raised by Brandon Rhodes I’ve been going through the first three books of Augustine’s City of God with the following question in mind: Does the reading of the New Testament’s outlook on its future that I have put forward both in The Coming of the Son of Man and in Re: Mission find any resonance or confirmation in Augustine’s reflections on the fall of Rome?

My basic contention has been that Jesus’ eschatological horizon is the Jewish war against Rome, that the church as it entered the pagan world extended that horizon to include the overthrow of Rome as a hubristic pagan force opposed to the God of Israel, and that we have glimpses beyond that of a third horizon consisting of a final judgment, the renewal of creation, and the final defeat of evil and death. The story of the Son of man who is to be seen coming on the clouds of heaven encompasses the first two horizons: the early community’s experience of suffering in Christ and the hope of vindication.

I must stress that I have only a very sketchy acquaintance with the writings of the church fathers, so these should be treated as uneducated notes. I also recognize that when later in the book he discusses the biblical texts that speak of future events, Augustine’s approach is rather conventional. For example, he regards the parousia that Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 as part of the ‘last judgement of God’ (XX.20), not as the moment at which the suffering church is vindicated in the ancient world. So I have to admit that it is in his interpretation of recent history that Augustine supports my reading of New Testament eschatology, not in his interpretation of scripture, though the following passage illustrates a certain ambivalence in his position:

I pass over a large number of passages which seem to refer to the last judgement, but turn out to be ambiguous on careful examination, or to have more relevance to some other subject. They may refer, for example, to the coming of the Saviour in the sense that he comes throughout this present age in the person of his Church, that is in his members, part by part and little by little, since the whole Church is his body; or the reference may be to the destruction of the earthly Jerusalem. For when he speaks of that destruction he generally uses language suitable to describing the end of the world and the last great day of judgement; so that the two events cannot possibly be distinguished except by comparing the parallel statements on this subject in the three evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke. For one sets out certain points more obscurely, another more plainly; and this comparison is needed to make it clear where statements referring to the same subject begin. I have been at pains to follow this procedure in a letter I wrote to Hesychius of blessed memory, bishop of Salona, a letter entitled ‘On the End of the World.’ (XX.5)

1. In Re: Mission I argue that when Paul speaks in Romans 1:18-2:11 about the wrath that is coming on the Greek, he has in mind specifically the Greek-Roman world with its distinctive set of religious and moral shortcomings and expects this ‘wrath’ to take concrete historical form. Although in I.8 Augustine appears to interpret Romans 2:4-5 with reference to a ‘last judgment’, he nevertheless sees in the ‘universal catastrophe’ (I.9) of the sacking a clear instance of divine judgment on Rome because of corrupt morals:

They attribute their deliverance to their own destiny; whereas if they had any right judgement they ought rather to attribute the harsh cruelty they suffered at the hands of their enemies to the providence of God. For God’s providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind…. (I.1)

He also speaks of the ‘temporal ills which are the recompense of sin’ and of those ‘whose fearful arrogance, lust, and greed, whose detestable wickedness and impiety, have caused God to give effect to his threats and warnings by bringing destruction on the earth’ (I.9). Complaining bitterly of those Romans who insulted the Christian women who had been raped by the invaders, he writes:

For in the ruin of the city it was stone and timber which fell to the ground; but in the lives of those Romans we saw the collapse not of material but of moral defences, not of material but of spiritual grandeur. (II.2)

2. Augustine applies Paul’s teaching about wealth in 1 Timothy 6:6-19 to the circumstances of the fall of Rome (I.10). Significantly Paul’s advice centres around the parousia hope: ‘keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time’ (1 Tim. 6:14-15).

3. Augustine’s reference to the fact that the ‘nations in the East were bewailing your catastrophe’ and the ‘greatest cities in the farthest parts of the earth were keeping days of public grief and mourning’ sounds like a remarkable fulfilment of the John’s account of the fall of Babylon the great:

And the kings of the earth, who committed sexual immorality and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning. They will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say, "Alas! Alas! You great city, you mighty city, Babylon! For in a single hour your judgment has come." (Rev. 18:9-10)

4. Christ is made explicitly the judge of morally depraved Rome (cf. Acts 17; Rom. 2:1-11) and the one who is at the same time establishing an alternative city:

Christ with divine authority denounces and condemns the offences of men, and their perverted lusts and he gradually withdraws his family from all parts of the world which is failing and declining through those evils, so that he may establish a city whose titles of ‘eternal’ and ‘glorious’ are not given by meaningless flattery but by the judgment of truth. (II.18)

He judges the imperial enemy of the people of God at his ‘coming’, according to the typology of Daniel 7; it is Christ who abolishes the worship of the pagan gods. But this marks not the end of the story for the church but the vindication of those who suffered faithfully and the decisive establishment of his followers as God’s alternative society.

5. Augustine speaks of salvation as the deliverance of Christians from the the corruption of pagan culture and the catastrophe of its downfall:

Men have been rescued, through the name of Christ, from the hellish yoke of those polluted powers and from a share in their condemnation; they have passed from the night of blasphemy and perdition into the daylight of salvation and true godliness. (II.28)

6. Augustine quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid in describing the Roman Christian martyrs who ‘have wrestled everywhere against hostile powers, have conquered them by the courage of their deaths, and "have won this country for us by their blood"’ (II.29). This is exactly the argument of The Coming of the Son of Man - that the victory of the early church over hostile paganism was won through faithful suffering. Significantly, echoing Paul in Romans 13:11-12, he addresses the Romans, ‘Awake! The day has come.’

I don’t want to overstate the case here, but there is at least an argument to be made that Augustine’s understanding of the sacking of Rome by Alaric just three or four years before he wrote this section of the City of God correlates rather well with the view that the eventual judgment against Rome and vindication of the suffering community of disciples formed a central element in the eschatological narrative of the New Testament.