This book is the English translation of a doctoral thesis submitted to the Theological Faculty of the University of Utrecht in 1986. As such it has undergone little editing, so that the format is what one would expect of a thesis—a great deal of detailed argument and masses of footnotes, not all of which are of equal importance! The book has five chapters, of which the first and last are a short introduction and conclusion. The second chapter is extremely long, and deals mainly with prolegomena—the career of Augustine, the background to the City of God and the meaning of civitas. Augustine’s attitude to the Roman Empire is examined at great length, and the author concludes that he was not a pessimist, if by that is meant someone who believed that the Empire was finished after the sack of Rome. Like most of his contemporaries, Augustine was inclined to believe that such an ancient and universal political structure would recover and continue to exercise its earthly ministry.

The third chapter examines different models for the structure of the City of God, and discusses whether it is an apology or a catechetical work. In the end the author concludes that it is both, which seems sensible enough. It is the fourth chapter which forms the real meat of the book, and it too is very long. The author exhaustively explores the various possibilities which present themselves as sources for the Two Cities doctrine. He studies the influence of Manichaeism on Augustine in great detail before considering the Greek philosophical inheritance (Platonism, Stoicism and Philo), the Donatist Tyconius and finally the Judaeo-Christian tradition. One by one he rejects them, until he comes to the last, of which he says:‘… it is not only in a general sense that the preceding Christian, the Jewish and particularly the archaic Jewish-Christian tradition can be seen as the most likely source of Augustine’s doctrine of the two civitates. In a more specific sense one may almost certainly point to a prior catechetical tradition in the Early Church. In this tradition too, the originally Jewish element occupied an important place’ (p. 359).

From this it can be seen that he takes a very conservative and essentially biblical approach to the City of God. This is not very surprising, of course, but when we consider how many attempts have been made to demonstrate that Augustine was not really ‘biblical’ in his thinking, it comes as a refreshing reminder of his independence with regard to his secular inheritance, and his deep attachment to the roots of Christianity. The book is probably too detailed for most students to grasp easily, but it may help to revise the outlook of the scholarly world with respect to the greatest thinker the Western church has yet produced.

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