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purpose. The heavenly city is the path to eternal heavenly bliss. The earthly city,

merely serves this path. The City of God is everything.

How important was Augustine?
Augustine’s “City of God” has one basic message: only the Heavenly City has
meaning. “Salus extra ecclesiam non est” he wrote: “there is no salvation outside the
Church”. He argued strongly for obedience to the Pope and devoted much time and
energy in demolishing the arguments of Christian heretics: “Roma locuta est; causa
finite”, he wrote: “Rome [i.e. the Pope] has spoken: the case is closed”.

But the big problem with Augustine is that he never explains how his two cities
should actually relate and work together in practice. How was power to be
exercised? To put it crudely, who gives the orders? Augustine did not say, because
this was not the question he was addressing. His priority was to assert the supremacy
of the Heavenly City. Rome was disintegrating before his eyes. He wrote the “City of
God” to give these terrible events meaning for his fellow Christians. He could hardly

be expected to consider the practical functioning of a Christendom that had yet to be
born.

After Augustine the leaders of the Christian Church used his arguments to justify their
authority over secular rulers. Pope Gelasius began this in a letter of 494: “There are
two powers by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the
bishops (“auctoritas sacrata pontificum”) and the royal power (“regalis potestas”). Of
these that of the priests is the more weighty, since they have to render an account

for even the kings of men in the divine judgment.” Throughout medieval Europe this
became the accepted view of Christendom. The spiritual realm was superior – at
least in theory. But secular rulers did not accept the wider implication that spiritual
leaders could order them around, far less depose them in they refused to obey.

As the Middle Ages progressed Augustine’s concept of “two cities” and Gelasius’

“two powers” were expressed as “two swords”. The Popes wielded the sword of
spiritual authority, while rulers wielded the secular sword to protect and promote
the church. Perhaps the sword metaphor helped to encourage the Popes to express
ever wider claims and ambitions. As Boniface VIII (Pope 1294- 1303) wrote, “There
are two swords, the spiritual and the temporal. Both are under the control of the
Church. The first is wielded by the Church; the second is wielded on behalf of the
Church. The first is wielded by the hands of the priest, the second by the hands of
kings and soldiers, but at the wish and by the permission of the priests. Sword must
be subordinate to sword, and it is only fitting that the temporal authority should be

subject to the spiritual." Although in a society like Christendom people were bound