Introduction

2009 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Near East ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
The State ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
City Of God ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City

This chapter provides an overview of Book V of Augustine's The City of God. It analyzes how Rome has extended her imperial sway throughout Europe and the Near East in spite of the moral bankruptcy of the Roman state. It also reviews the solution offered by some philosophers about the expansion and consolidation of empire as the outcome of chance or fate. The chapter discusses how providence has endowed Roman leaders with traditional virtues that the aims of glory and honour for the individual, and dominion for the state that are at odds with Christianity's application of the virtues. It reviews the key to Augustine's philosophy of history, in which the Roman empire has spread and is maintained in existence by divine providence.

On the City of Man

Worldview ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Donald Brandon
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Great Book ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
The Other ◽  
City Of God ◽  
John Xxiii ◽  
The Future ◽  
Good Will ◽  
Pope John Xxiii ◽  
The City

St. Augustine wrote the City of God at a time of trouble for the Roman Empire. Pope John XXIII issued his Pacem in Terris “ to all men of good will“ in an age of universal conflict. While Augustine's philosophy of history includes a conception of an ideal Christian commonwealth, the predominant theme in his great book is pessimism regarding the City of Man. The strongest motif in the late Pope's encyclical, on the other hand, is optimism concerning the power of responsible men to shape the future in a favorable way.

Augustine: De Civitate Dei The City of God Book V

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Near East ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
City Of God ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This edition of St. Augustine's The City of God (De Civitate Dei) is the only one in English to provide a text and translation as well as a detailed commentary of this most influential document in the history of western Christianity. In Book V, Augustine searches out and presents an answer to the question which lies behind the earlier books. In spite of the moral bankruptcy of the Roman state, and in spite of the disasters and injustices which have marked her history since the foundation, Rome has extended her imperial sway throughout Europe and the Near East. If the pagan gods have not guided her to this terrestrial eminence, how has this success been achieved? Augustine divides his response into four main sections: addressing the pagan notion of fate; arguing that God aided the Romans to imperial glory because a minority of them were virtuous even though they did not worship him; stating explicitly that the Roman Empire was set in place by God and is governed by his providence; and devoting the final section to the advent of Christian Emperors. The edition presents Latin text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

Trade, Commerce, and the State in the Roman World

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Market Regulation ◽  
External Trade ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The City ◽  
Political Character ◽  
Different Sources

This interdisciplinary volume presents nineteen chapters by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing trade in the Roman Empire in the period c.100 BC to AD 350, and in particular the role of the Roman state, in shaping the institutional framework for trade within and outside the Empire, in taxing that trade, and in intervening in the markets to ensure the supply of particular commodities, especially for the city of Rome and for the army. The chapters in this volume address facets of the subject on the basis of widely different sources of evidence—historical, papyrological, and archaeological—and are grouped in three sections: institutional factors (taxation, legal structures, market regulation, financial institutions); evidence for long-distance trade within the Empire, in wood, stone, glass, and pottery; and trade beyond the frontiers, with the East (as far as China), India, Arabia, and the Red Sea, and the Sahara. Rome’s external trade with realms to the east emerges as being of particular significance to the fisc. But in the eastern part of the Empire at least, the state appears, in collaboration with the elite holders of wealth, to have adapted the mechanisms of taxation, both direct and indirect, to support its need for revenue. On the other hand, the price of that collaboration, which was in effect a fiscal partnership, in slightly different forms in East and West, in the longer term fundamentally changed the political character of the Empire.

‘Where Were the Gods?’

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-123
Author(s):  
Gerard O'Daly
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
The City

The chapter analyzes Books 1–5, which are dominated by Augustine’s polemic against Roman polytheistic religion. Book 1 functions as an overture to central themes of the work, especially the contrast between the city of God, ‘an alien among the ungodly’, and the pride and desire for domination of the earthly city; it concentrates mainly on the moral and religious issues arising from Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. The principal themes of these books are: pagan and Christian virtues; the moral deficiencies of Roman religion and the failure of the gods to protect Rome throughout its violent and disaster-prone history; God’s providential role in the success of empires, especially the Roman Empire; arguments against fate; Christian virtues and imperial rule.

Aspects of Mediaeval Thought on Church and State

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhart B. Ladner
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Human Society ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Heavenly City ◽  
The City

“Two loves,” St. Augustine says in De Civitate Dei, “have made two cities, love of self unto contempt of God the Earthly City, love of God unto contempt of self the Heavenly City,” the City of God. These “cities”—civitates—are, of course, not states, but societies; St. Augustine himself tells us that the term civitas is an equivalent of the term society. They are societies, however, of a special kind. The Ciyitds Dei is a “mystical” society of all the elect, past, present and future. The Civitas Terrena, the Earthly City, is identical neither with the earthly state nor with any particular earthly state such as the Roman Empire, nor with any merely human society, it too is a “mystical” society, that of the impious, the damned.

Early Pentecostals and the Almost Chosen People

Pneuma ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-166
Author(s):  
Grant Wacker
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Good Faith ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Civil State ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Political Ties ◽  
The City ◽  
Roger Williams

AbstractSince time immemorial, it seems, Christians have struggled with the claims of loyalty to the civil state. For every Roger Williams who insisted that the Christian's allegiances stood above and beyond the state, there was a John Cotton who insisted with equal conviction that the Christian must negotiate between the City of God and the City of Man. As biblical and cultural primitivists, early Pentecostals instinctively identified with the former outlook. Their first thought in the morning was to free themselves from all earthly alliances, including emotional attachments, to the state. But by noon they found that their aspiration to shed mundane political ties was easier claimed than achieved. The sheer complication of getting through life without making endless accommodations to the demands of the civil realm proved more daunting than they had imagined. By nightfall many, perhaps most, realized that political purity was a lost cause to begin with. Conscience told them not to avoid the state but to find ways to live with it in good faith. They discovered, as historian R. Laurence Moore said in a different context, that "[m]eaningful activity in history usually involve[d] exchanging one dilemma for another."1

Kingdom and Polity in Eusebius of Caesarea

1952 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Edward Cranz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
New World ◽  
Human Society ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
General Answer ◽  
The City ◽  
Eusebius Of Caesarea ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
Christian Society

Eusebius of Caesarea occupies a unique position in ancient Christian thought. His central problem is to explain and justify a Christian society which is to transform the Roman Empire and which will become the new world civilization supplanting Hellenism and Judaism. Earlier thinkers do not face this problem. The Roman Empire is for them one of the powers ordained of God, but it is pagan and they expect it to remain so. Consequently the question of human government is only peripheral to their thought. Nor do later thinkers see the problem quite as Eusebius does. In the East, for example in Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus, the question of human government again becomes peripheral to Christian thought, and Eusebius has no successor as a “political theologian.” In the West, Augustine gives a general answer to the problem of a Christian society in a Christianized Empire, but his solution contradicts that of Eusebius. To Augustine, the structure of the Christian Roman Empire is still that of Babylon, and human society is still a mixture of two opposed cities, the earthly city and the city of God.

Egyptian—Demotic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedhelm Hoffmann
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Near East ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
The State ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Large Corpus

Demotic is a late phase of the Egyptian language and writing which began in the middle of the seventh century BCE. When after 30 BCE Egypt became part of the Roman Empire, Demotic was still widely used by the Egyptian priestly elite. A large corpus of literary, paraliterary and documentary texts has survived mainly on papyri, sherds, and as graffiti. Only in the middle of the fifth century CE, by which time Christianity was established as the state religion, does Demotic cease to exist. This chapter gives an overview of the Demotic language and writing, as well as its rich textual material and different forms and genres, and also draws the reader’s attention to the international relations (mainly with the ancient Near East and with Greece, but also e.g. with India) which can be observed in Demotic texts.

scholarly journals The pedagogical proposal for Rural Education in the state of Pernambuco: dialogues between Rural Education, integrated curriculum and interdisciplinarity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Odair Franca de Carvalho ◽  
Josenilde Lima dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Rural Education ◽  
Integrated Curriculum ◽  
School Context ◽  
The State ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Exploratory Research ◽  
Community Practice ◽  
School Based ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City

Rural education, as an educational theory and practice, has a history marked by compensatory, discontinuous policies and with a developmentalist bias without commitment to the provision of social quality education. The reflections presented here are the result of a Master's research and reflect on the pedagogical praxis of educators from a rural school, based on the concepts of integrated curriculum and interdisciplinarity in a school unit of the state public system, in the city of Petrolina-PE. The research was anchored in the qualitative approach, through descriptive and exploratory research, with bibliographic review, document analysis, followed by observation, questionnaires and interviews. Data analysis was based on the understanding of Content Analysis, according to Bardin (2009). We conclude that the investigated praxis is based on the pedagogical proposal of Education of the Countryside of the State of Pernambuco, whose principles are based on the concept of integrated curriculum and interdisciplinarity, in the experience of collective planning and recognition of the school context, as articulating elements of the theory relationship, teaching and community practice. However, it presents a superficial understanding as to the understanding of the interdisciplinary movement in practice, in addition to the necessary investment in strengthening the individual and collective training process.

Imperiumand the City of God: Augustine on Church and Empire

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 46-70
Author(s):  
Gillian Clark
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Roman Africa ◽  
Heavenly City ◽  
The City

In early fifth-century Roman Africa, Augustine faced pagan opponents who thought that the Roman empire was at risk because Christian emperors banned the worship of its gods, and that Christian ethics were no way to run an empire. He also faced Christian opponents who held that theirs was the true Church, and that the Roman empire was the oppressive power of Babylon. For Augustine, Church and empire consist of people. Everyone belongs either to the heavenly city, the community of all who love God even to disregard of themselves, or to the earthly city, the community of all who love themselves even to disregard of God. The two cities are intermixed until the final judgement shows that some who share Christian sacraments belong to the earthly city, and some officers of empire belong to the heavenly city. Empire manifests the earthly city's desire to dominate, butimperium, the acknowledged right to give orders, is necessary to avoid permanent conflict. Empire, like everything else, is given or permitted by God, for purposes we do not know.

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