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Title: City of God (Penguin Classics) by St. Augustine, David Knowles, Henry Bettenson ISBN: 0-14-044426-2 Publisher: Penguin USA Pub. Date: June, 1984 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.71 (21 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Literal version of a classic
Comment: Augustine wrote the City of God to respond to pagan charges that Rome fell to the barbarians because Christianity had made it soft and removed the gods' (small "g") blessings. Augustine uses devastating (and occasionally tedious) historical reasoning and sheer deductive logic to demolish that view. Those who know little Roman history will have trouble understanding the allusions. There are, however, footnotes for the more obscure references.
Thomas Merton, probably the most activist contemplative in the 20th century, surely read the book in the original and felt he could make a more readable translation. This version is almost painfully literal. He adopts Augustine's Latin style, which tends to be very verbose. Forty word sentences, such as we would "ding" a 9th grader for, are the result. And those are the short ones! Nonetheless, blame the Latin original.
Still, shortening the sentences will in many cases lose some of the meaning. Latins thought a lot more rigorously and logically than we. Augustine was their leader. Don't read this non-stop, and have a history of Rome handy, just in case. This is a Christian classic that every educated person should know, but that doesn't mean it's as easy as, say, something by Tim LeHay.
Rating: 5
Summary: The defining work of the Christian faith outside the Bible
Comment: Like one of the reviewers above, I, too, set about the daunting task of reading this book from cover to cover, and it took me a good six months to complete it. But what a wonderful and worthwhile investment of time it was! It would do the modern Church well to read this book since Augustine places the City of God (i.e., Christ and His Church) within the context of the pagan world in which we live, and its message is as applicable to today as it was 1,500 years ago when he first wrote it. Most impressive, his grasp of both classical and biblical history and his profound understanding of Scripture is unparalleled by almost any author I have ever read, from Jerome's time until the present. If for no other reason, Christians should buy this book to gain an appropriate understanding of the last days and the rightful interpretation of the book of Revelation. Most of today's books on this subject pale in comparison to Augustine's exposition of this lofty and (sometimes) arcane subject.
Rating: 5
Summary: The foundations of Christianity
Comment: Saint Augustine (354 - 430 AD), was born at a time when the Roman Empire was in its nadir, a situation quite antipodal to the heydays of the glorious times of the philosopher emperor Julius Caesar and a few others that, for the glory of Rome, spread the wings of the Roman conquest to the borders of almost all the civilized world, from Britain in the West to the occidental limits of the Persian Empire in the East. The barbarians hordes were already knocking at the gates of Rome and many other important cities and eventually got there invadind Rome trough the auspices of the Germanic barbarian Alaric, who, along with Atila the Hun, was one of the cruelest of his kind. The "Civitatis Dei" was written a few years after the first sack of Rome, a thrilling background to and the starting point of many of Saint Augustine ideas concerning God's attitude toward the city and its citizens. Despite the impending fall of the Western Empire, Christianism was steadily gaining ground as the official religion vis-à-vis Paganinsm, which began to suffer all the burden of (unofficial) persecuted by some Roman emperors. But Paganinsm still had strong adherents in many important places, specially in the Senate, and the purpose of Saint Augustine was to counterpoise the ascending fortunes of Christianity.
Augustine, born in the north of Africa in the city of Hippo, was one of the most important theoreticians of Christian doctrine of all times, a great thinker in his own right, who could be compared to great Catholic thinkers as Saint Thomas Aquina and Saint Paul, being one of the true founding fathers of the Catholic tradition and religion along with the Gospel four Evangelists. His written output is impressive, even outstanding, both from the point of view of its quantity as from the point of view of its inner quality. His most important works, written in Latin as usual at the time, are "The City of God" (Civitatis Dei) and "Confessions", the former an impressive book of 1,100+ pages of teachings concerning various aspects of the lives of Christians and pagans in the V century he lived.
The book's lenght notwithstanding, it is a very pleasant and easy reading, not losing the elegance it should have in Latin, with all the quotations necessary for the full understanding concerning some allusion of Augustine to the recent or remote history of Rome, ROman and Greek mythology and philosophical citations from authors renowned at the time but almost unknown today. A good introduction to the life and work of Saint Augustine is also provided.
TO sum it up, the book is a very good one and an essential reading to anyone interested in the importance of the philosophical thinking before the Middle Ages, most certainly influenced by Plato instead of Aristotle. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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Title: Confessions (Oxford World's Classics) by Saint Augustine, Henry Chadwick ISBN: 0192833723 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, Revised Edition with a New Epilogue by Peter Robert Lamont Brown ISBN: 0520227573 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 07 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Republic by Plato ISBN: 0486411214 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 18 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $2.50 |
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Title: The Politics by Aristotle, T.A. Sinclair, Trevor J. Saunders ISBN: 0140444211 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1992 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Trinity by Saint Augustine, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Edmund Hill ISBN: 0911782966 Publisher: New City Press Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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