A test of endurance

Finally, after two years of sporadic reading, I have finished Augustine's The City of God.  I'm actually more satisfied at having completed the book than I am with any benefit from reading it.  Maybe that's why I shouldn't have kept reading it, as Alan Jacobs would say.

Still, it's a remarkable book, even if much of it isn't accessible as, say, Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.  Augustine states his theme right away:

The glorious city of God is my theme in this work, which you, my dearest son Marcellinus, suggested, and which is due to you by my promise.  I have undertaken its defense against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of this city -- a city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now with patience waits for, expecting until 'righteousness shall return unto judgment,' and it obtain, by virtue of its excellence, final victory and perfect peace.

There isn't much he doesn't cover.  One of the tricky things about Augustine is that there's so much good (the Protestant Reformers appealed to him again and again in their polemics against the Roman Catholics), yet there's still plenty that we can't quite go along with.  His theology of the sacraments comes to mind in this latter regard.

But if it wasn't for him people like Luther and Calvin would have had so much more work to do to reclaim the gospel.  We all stand on the shoulder of giants to see more clearly than they did.  Augustine was one such giant, maybe the most gigantic of all.