The city that fell
Sack of Rome and Augustine's response
On the 24th of August, 410 AD, Alaric and his Visigoths sack Rome.
The city has not been taken by a foreign enemy in eight hundred years. It is not merely a military defeat — it is a cosmological event, an earthquake in the imagination of the ancient world. Rome is eternal. Rome is the order beneath chaos. Rome is civilization. And now Alaric's army is inside the walls, pillaging the city for three days.
The shock across the empire is total. Jerome, in his monastery in Bethlehem, writes that he cannot speak, that his voice catches in his throat when he tries to describe it. Refugees pour into North Africa by the thousands.
And the pagans have an explanation: Christianity. The empire abandoned its gods for this Christ, and now the gods have abandoned the empire. The Christians destroyed Rome.
Augustine, bishop of Hippo, cannot ignore this. He begins writing.
Thirteen years and twenty-two books later, he finishes The City of God — the most ambitious work of theology in the first millennium of the church. His argument is vast and systematic: there are two cities, built on two loves. The City of Man, built on love of self to the point of contempt for God. The City of God, built on love of God to the point of contempt for self. They are intermingled in history. They will be separated at the end.
Rome was never eternal. It was always temporary — magnificent, useful, worth preserving, but always finite. Only one city is eternal. And its foundations are not walls.
“Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”
— Augustine, City of God XIV.28, c. 413–426 AD
“For we don't have here an enduring city, but we seek that which is to come.”
The fall of Rome felt, to the people who lived through it, like the end of everything stable. The eternal city was burning. If Rome could fall, what was safe?
Augustine's answer was not comfort — it was reorientation. You have been loving a temporary city as if it were eternal, he says. You have been building your security on a foundation that was always going to crack. The question is not whether Rome will fall. Every city of man falls. The question is which city you are actually a citizen of.
Every generation faces its version of the sack of Rome — the institution, the nation, the system, the certainty that seemed permanent and turns out not to be.
What have you been treating as eternal that is actually temporary? And what does that mean for where your weight is resting?