Augustine's City of God: A Reader's Guide

By Gerard O'Daly

Book Overview

b The most influential of Augustine's works, iCity of God/i played a decisive role in the formation of the Christian West. /b

Augustine wrote City of God in the aftermath of the Gothic sack of Rome in AD 410, at a time of rapid Christianization across the Roman Empire. Gerard O'Daly's book remains the most comprehensive modern guide in any language to this seminal work of European literature.

In this new and extensively revised edition, O'Daly takes into account the abundant scholarship on Augustine in the twenty years since its first publication, while retaining the book's focus on Augustine as a writer in the Latin tradition. He explores the many themes of City of God, which include cosmology, political thought, anti-pagan polemic, Christian apologetic, theory of history, and biblical interpretation. This guide, therefore, is about a single literary masterpiece, yet at the same time it surveys Augustine's developing views through the whole range of his thought. As well as a running commentary on each part of the work, O'Daly provides chapters on the themes of the work, a bibliographical guide to research on its reception, translations of any Greek and Latin texts discussed, and detailed suggestions for further reading.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198841248
• ISBN13: 9780198841241
• Release Date: November 2020
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A Masterful Survey of Augustine's Magnum Opus

O Daly's masterful survey of Augustine's colossal work, the City of God, is in itself the foremost study of its kind, covering as it does the twenty-two books of the City of God, with a fine cornucopia of scholarly and insightful analyses, summaries and sweeping commentary. Principle themes to the City of God are highlighted and the profound wealth of philosophical, theological, historical, biblical and apocalyptic thought inherent to the text is elucidated and discussed in a terse, clear-cut fashion [also illuminated is the contextual setting and the cultural and literary stimuli which led to the City of God's composition]. Therefore, this reader's guide is not only the most scholarly treatment on the City of God available, but it is also the best and most accommodating means of approaching this most extraordinary text. In a word, Gerard O' Daly has given us the ultimate companion to Bishop Augustine's City of God; and this volume should be standard reading in institutions where the City of God is studied; also, it should go hand-in-hand with any full-scale research conducted upon the text. [See also O Daly's work, The Poetry of Boethius, which is an artful critique on the poetry found in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.]