Augustine of Hippo – The Metropolis of God (Half 37 of 69)
Augustine of Hippo – The Metropolis of God (Half 37 of 69)
“Augustine’s Metropolis of God, a monumental work of spiritual lore, philosophy, and historical past, was written as a type of literary tombstone for Roman tradition. After the sack of Rome, Augustine wrote this ebook to anatomize the corruption of Romans’ pursuit of earthly pleasures: “greedy for reward, open-handed with their cash; trustworthy within the pursuit of wealth, they wished to hoard glory.” Augustine contrasts his condemnation of Rome with an exaltation of Christian tradition. The glory that Rome failed to achieve will solely be realized by residents of the Metropolis of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem foreseen in Revelation. As a result of Metropolis of God was written for males of classical learning–custodians of the tradition Augustine sought to condemn–it is thick with Ciceronian circumlocutions, and makes many stark contrasts between “Your Virgil” and “Our Scriptures.” Even when Augustine’s prose strikes fashionable ears as a bit bombastic, and if his polarized Christian/pagan world is extra binary than the one we dwell in at present, his arguments in opposition to utopianism and his protection of the richness of Christian tradition stay helpful and robust. Metropolis of God is, as its remaining phrases proclaim itself to be, “a large of a ebook.” “–Michael Joseph Gross
B. B. Warfield stated, “Augustine [was one of the early founders] of Roman Catholicism and the writer of that doctrine of grace which it has been the consistently pursued effort of Roman Catholicism to neutralize, and which in actual fact both have to be neutralized by, or will neutralize, Roman Catholicism. Two youngsters had been struggling within the womb of his thoughts. There will be little doubt which was the kid of his coronary heart. His doctrine of the Church he had obtained complete from his predecessors, and he gave it merely the precision and vitality which insured its persistence. His doctrine of grace was all his personal:it represented the very core of his being . . . it was inevitable, had time been allowed, that his inherited doctrine of the Church, too, with all its implications, would have gone down earlier than it, and Augustine would have bequeathed to the Church, not “issues,” however a totally labored out system of evangelical faith. . . . The issue which Augustine bequeathed to the Church for answer, the Church required a thousand years to resolve. Besides, it’s Augustine who gave us the Reformation. For the Reformation, inwardly thought of, was simply the last word triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church. (Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, 321-22)” from the video introduction
