Augustine’s City of God identifies pride and humility as the founding principles of the City of Man and the City of God. Leaving no mystery as to the identity of the most recent embodiment of the arrogant City of Man in his own day, Augustine quotes two significant lines from Virgil’s Aeneid. The famous passage from Virgil’s epic concerns Rome’s perfection of the “imperial arts” and its boast of its unique, divinely appointed mission to “beat down the proud.” Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil reinforces Rome’s historical mission. Father Jupiter himself had appointed Rome to found a universal, everlasting kingdom of peace, justice, and righteousness, leading history to its final destination, a new Age of Saturn in which the temple of war would be shut and law and order prevail throughout the inhabited world. In The City of God, however, Augustine seeks to undermine these pretensions. Humbling the proud is God’s prerogative, not Rome’s. It is a mission that Rome has falsely “claimed as its own.” Such grandiose aspirations made Rome nothing less than an impostor City of God, a sham Eternal City, appropriating to itself the mission that belongs exclusively to Christ’s kingdom, whose founder is not Aeneas but God himself…
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