“Saint Augustine and the Fall of Rome”
This essay will discuss the most important ideas of Saint Augustine’s view on the destruction of the Roman Empire, particularly the city of Rome. This will be illustrated by humanistic and moral destruction of Roman society and justifying the Augustine’s idea of coming back to the spiritual principles of Christian God.
Saint Augustine was in his fifties and the bishop of Hippo in Numidia, North Africa, when the Visigoths ran over Italy and destroyed Rome in the fifth century AD -- the news that symbolized the amount of Visigoth violence. Augustine saw the refugees coming into North Africa, including noble families from Rome, and he heard blame that Rome's destruction was the result of negligence to worship the city's traditional gods. Christians were responding with uncertainty to this kind of blame. They believed that their god protected people, and obviously Rome had not been protected. Christians also believed that God had linked Rome and Christianity. And, with disaster of falling Rome, they needed a new view on God's ties with Rome and with Christians. Augustine explained it,
drawing from the old association of evil with the present world and on the habit to put things into the form of metaphor.
In a series of speeches, Augustine told to people not to worry, that they were not citizens of Rome or forgotten children of Earth but that they were citizens of the heavenly city of Jerusalem. Augustine believed that since the fall of Adam the loyalties of the human race had been divided between two great symbolic cities. One city, the heavenly city of Jerusalem, served God together with his angels. The other city, Babylon, represented by Rome, served the rebel angels: the devil and his demons. Saint Augustine also believed that although Jerusalem and Babylon appeared mixed they would be separated at the Last Judgment. The righteous people would return to the heavenly city of Jerusalem just as the prophets had predicted of the return of Jews to their homeland.
Augustine's response to the charge that Christianity was to blame for the fall of Rome appeared in a work called The City of God. In this work he argued that although Rome had suffered a great fall, God was actively at work in human history. He believed that Rome was not eternal, as some people had thought, but rather being the great peace -- maker it had to be destroy. Augustine also claimed that Rome had been influenced both by God and by demons that made Rome sinful. Rome in Augustine view was based on self-love, robbery, violence and lie. The Romans were the most successful thieves in history. Viewing Roman culture, Augustine described slavery and private property not as the creations of God but as a sin.
Christianity could not save Rome because those with power, including Christian emperors, could not erase corruption of humanity's sin. Rome had to perish the same way as sinful cities of the Old Testament.
Augustine ideas were immediate philosophical and moral responses to the crisis of the Roman Empire. By writing his most influential work “The city of God” he became a pioneer of Christian philosophy and one of the most cited writers in history of Western Civilization.