Nothing is more evident, seemingly, about Augustine’s ciu. Dei than its structure. Any reasonably serious relevant website reveals that it is divided into two “halves,” comprising Books 1–10 and 11–22, each further subdivided into halves and thirds, respectively. Augustine himself accounts for the structure in just this way. In retr. he distinguishes the first ten books and the last twelve as the main textual units. The first ten respond to “two groundless opinions that are opposed to the Christian religion.” The first five reply to “those who would have it that human success depends on what they regard as the essential observance of the many gods whom they customarily worship”; the next five books rebut those who argue that the observance they make to the multitude of gods by sacrificing brings profit to life after death.” Augustine adds, lest it be objected that he would then have done nothing but refute the opinions of others without asserting any of his own, the last twelve books accomplish this goal: “in the twelve books that come later, the first four contain an account of the rise of the two cities, the City of God and the city of this world, the second four expound their growth or progress, and the third and final four their appointed ends.” Thus the first “half” leads with response and refutation, and the second half with constructive theology. As Augustine also observes, however, this distinction is not absolute: “Nonetheless, where necessary I both maintain our own standpoint in the first ten books, and reject the opposing views in the later twelve” (retr. 2.69; see also, ep. 1A*.1).

In the first ten books of ciu. Dei, Augustine makes his case for Christian beatitude against the worldly glory of pagan Rome. Book 11 is a pivot. There he tells us – and now “we” seem to be his Christian and not his pagan readership – that we know best of the City of God, that eternal thing that peregrinates through time, from the witness of sacred writings, Psalms especially (87:3, 48:1–2, 48:8, 46:4–5), and from the inspiring love of the city’s founder. Most of us, most of the time, mix self-interest into that love and obscure for ourselves the beauty of the beloved. The moral is not that love must be selfless or worse, self-loathing, but that sacrificial love, sensing what is holy, practices humility. The great mediator between heaven and earth, the Son of God, takes up a human life, his own, without ceasing to be God. His is the original act of humility – think of it also as first love – that speaks consistently through the Scriptures and renders them authoritative (ciu. Dei 11.3). While sin makes it impossible for a mind used to the dark to endure the relentless illumination of pure divinity (incommutabile lumen; ciu. Dei 11:2), Augustine reminds us that we have, by way of mediation, a text to interpret and a spirit of humility to bring to the reading.

Musical Romanticism and nationalism are both concepts closely tied to the idea of ‘the folk’. This chapter considers the twisting and turning relationships in music between Romanticism, nationalism, and the folk. It treats first the origin of the concepts. Next it takes up the importance of music as a folk ‘language of nature’, and the effect of German musical hegemony during the nineteenth century in spurring different configurations of ‘national’ and ‘folk’ music. It also looks at the realities that complicate many Romantic claims about national music, such as the presence and contributions of ethnic minorities. The chapter argues that Romantic musical nationalism in music is ultimately a series of reception tropes, and summarises five key approaches. It concludes with a study of a single piece, Smetana’s The Moldau, to show how these different tropes can converge and play off each other.

In ciu. Dei 6 and 7, Augustine turns from addressing arguments that Rome’s traditional pagan cult is requisite for the this-worldly prosperity of the city and its empire, to the prospects of these rituals conducing to personal well-being after death. Books 6 and 7 form a bridge between Augustine’s history of pre-Christian Rome in all its glory and its misery, and his consideration of philosophic or natural theology, especially accounts offered by the Platonic school, and the place it makes for traditional pagan worship. The main material from which this bridge is made, according to leading pagan intellectuals like Marcus Terentius Varro, is the traditional Roman civil religion. Varro variously presents Rome’s traditional civil religion as framed by its founders for political utility on the one hand, and philosophic pedagogy on the other. Civil theology and its rites thus understood bind mythic pagan deities and popular views of their intervention on behalf of Rome to a naturalistic, pantheist account of God or the gods as the world itself or its soul. As Augustine interprets Varro, the latter lends his learned, public-spirited support to the civil cult, even while directing thoughtful readers beyond it to philosophic or natural theology. Varro is thus an indispensable interlocutor for Augustine in completing the political-historical-religious inquiry of ciu. Dei 1–5, and in preparing for the engagement with Platonic natural theology in Books 8–10.

The complaint that the rise of Christianity had caused a series of calamities due to the neglect of the traditional polytheistic cults had already been combated by the early Latin apologists. In cataloguing catastrophes that had befallen Rome before the advent of Christ, Augustine moves on well-trodden ground, though the traditional complaint apparently had gained new force after the sack of Rome in AD 410. Accordingly, this chapter explores how Augustine adapts a traditional theme to his own apologetic purposes. It shows how he employs rhetorical pathos in order to deconstruct the idealizing view of early Roman history that had been canonized by the literary tradition and kept exerting influence on educated persons – both pagan and Christian – in his days. While he sometimes solicits an emotional response in order to reverse the traditional evaluation of a well-known event (ciu. Dei 3.14 on the Horatians and Curiatians), he is also prepared to exploit the traditional pathetic representation of the Civil Wars, available in authors like Lucan or Florus, to make his own point. His reading of Roman history as an almost uninterrupted series of civil wars reveals the distinction – conceded to the pagan adversaries in the opening chapter – between moral and external evils as artificial and marks the Roman Empire as an avatar of the ciuitas terrena, which is inevitably divided within itself. The chapters on Numa Pompilius briefly touch upon the systematically important issues of the relevance of peace for happiness and the relation of religion and philosophy and help to anchor Book 3 in the overall argument of the ciu. Dei as a whole.

As we arrive at ciu. Dei 21 and 22, we reach the final destination of the two cities after their long pilgrimage on earth. Book 21 deals with the final repudiation of the ciuitas terrena, the eternal punishment of the damned in Hell. Book 22 examines the ultimate fate of the ciuitas Dei, the eternal reward of the blessed in heaven. But, as I will argue in this chapter, one can also read the final books of the City of God as the endpoint of a specific intellectual journey on which Augustine had embarked decades earlier, one that led him to abandon much of the mental furniture of a late antique philosopher and to embrace – even to pioneer – a cosmology and a theological anthropology with specifically Christian contours.

In Book 19, Augustine concentrates on leading two audiences, both beset by different forms of violence, unrest, and insecurity within and without, to accept God’s offer of the peace that endures in heaven’s everlasting life as the supreme good. Primarily, this appeal for peace has a protreptic quality to attract a non-Christian audience. Especially for their sake Augustine uses, in addition to the divine authority of Scripture, the reason of philosophical argument in Book 19. Secondarily, the appeal has a didactic exhortation for a Christian audience to seek more ardently the peace of the heavenly Jerusalem. Even the pilgrim Church has “sheer misery compared to the happiness we call ultimate” (ciu. Dei 19.10; Babcock, 2.364; CCSL 48.674). Augustine makes his appeal for peace by humbling the peace of what each of the two audiences experiences. All people experience in this life on earth, in different ways, not only a broken society, but also a broken heart. But without recognizing that experience in humility, why would readers yearn for heaven’s peace? To all, Augustine makes an appeal for what he calls pax plenissima atque certissima (ciu. Dei 19.10; CCSL 48.674).

Books 8–10 of The City of God complete the polemical interrogation of pagan culture. As Augustine says, the last five of these ten are addressed to the philosophers whose connivance with the blasphemies of the civic cult exposes the insufficiency of reason as a means to the knowledge of God and the perfection of moral character. In the three books discussed here, his interlocutors are the Platonists Apuleius and Porphyry, one the foremost African man of letters before Augustine himself, the other a trenchant critic of the scriptures who had derided Christianity as the superstitious worship of a dead man. Augustine’s case against both is that, notwithstanding their adherence to a school which had come close to Christianity in its consciousness of the unity and sovereignty of God, they had returned to the most demotic form of polytheism, making human access to the gods depend on a race of aerial spirits who are inferior in piety and benevolence to the best denizens of earth. Augustine’s aim is to show that their speculations are inconsistent not only with scriptural teaching on the origin of demons, but with the genuine traditions of Platonism, the confession of the ancient prophet Hermes Trismegistus and Porphyry’s own intimations of the true nature of God.

This chapter explores a range of possible intersections between music, politics, and Romanticism in France and German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of early German Romantic theories of political organisation and how they influenced Romantic conceptions of art, I subsequently unpick the complicated relationship between the French Revolution and Romanticism in music, and between the politically revolutionary and the artistically revolutionary. I show the extreme adaptability of the Romantic aesthetic when it came to its political interpretation, not only through the contrast between German and French Romanticism, but also through the surprising twists and turns in the political associations of Romanticism in France over three decades. In the second section, I look at the political mobilisation of Romantic symbols in Prussian musical life to nationalist and dynastic ends, before ending with a brief consideration of politicised anti-Romanticism amongst music critics in 1848.

In conf., Augustine recounts how he was led to Manicheanism, in part, by his repugnance to Old Testament passages in which a human-like body is attributed to God (conf. 3.7). Ambrose helps to release the grip that Manicheanism had on Augustine by showing him that it is not always necessary to read the Old Testament literally (conf. 6.4 and 7.1). In Books 17 and 18 of the ciu. Dei, Augustine both rejects the notion that all of the Old Testament is allegorical (the allegorical cannot negate the literal meaning, and sometimes the text is purely historical) and affirms that the most important meaning of the Old Testament is prophetic (ciu. Dei 17.3). The earthly kingdom in the Old Testament is inherently allegorical and prophetic. It is not a kingdom that is about or for itself; it is about and for the future heavenly kingdom. The work of the prophets is to prevent the earthly kingdom from being taken too literally – as a kingdom whose meaning is wholly in the present and in itself.

This chapter considers the quintessential Romantic genre of art song. After a brief background in late eighteenth-century song style, it describes the expansion and deepening of the genre that began in the nineteenth century with the oeuvre of Franz Schubert. As other composers imitated and developed Schubert’s approach to song, poems in many languages were set to music. Across the century, these texts represent the changing emphases and concerns of Romantic poetry. The chapter outlines some central ideas of early German Romanticism: interdisciplinary collaboration, the idealisation of the fragment, and the importance of subjective experience. The gathering of short literary fragments into collections is compared to the song cycle, which groups songs to create a larger story or impression. Three case studies – songs by Schubert, Fauré, and Schumann – are explored to show how various poets and composers used scenes of nature metaphorically to express larger topics of pantheism, intimacy, and mystic unity.

The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s was decidedly inward-facing. Valorising interior response over external circumstance, Romantic listeners sought to be catapulted into a world of feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward to the affects and outward to the realm of nature. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana as a point of departure, this essay identifies three guiding principles of musical Romanticism: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to a more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. The essay shows how these principles undergird broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority, as evidenced by authors ranging from Hoffmann, W. H. Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim to G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Malwida von Meysenbug.

In the first three books of City of God, Augustine begins to defend Christianity against those who blame it for the sack of Rome. More specifically, Augustine is responding to both the written theological questions of the pagan Volusian, the proconsul of Africa (ep. 135), and Volusian’s spoken concerns relayed by his Christian friend, Marcellinus (ep. 136), that Christianity and Roman citizenship were incompatible. In his aim of exonerating the Christians from blame for Rome’s fall, Augustine, as Markus suggests, speaks of Rome “as an outsider.” But Rome plays a more complicated role in Augustine’s argument. For Augustine, we are a complex amalgam of experiences, memories, habits, affections, dispositions, and reason, all of which shape, both consciously and subconsciously, what we love. “To have a past,” as Wetzel observes, is “to admit grief into wisdom.” Augustine shares with his audience many of the same affective memories derived from his Roman upbringing and education. One need only recall Augustine’s recollection of how Virgil moved him to tears as a youth (conf. 1.13.20–21). Books 4 and 5 read not as a break from this Roman past, but as a recasting of memory. Citing Roman sources along the way, Augustine detaches paganism from romanticized images of Rome’s past, showing that traditional Roman religious practices not only fail to account for Roman successes, but also are the contrivance of elites used to conceal their criminality and justify domination.

Noted Augustine scholar J. H. S. Burleigh (d. 1985) once opined that Books 15–18 were “the least satisfactory section” of the entire ciu. Dei. While acknowledging that these words are comparative not superlative, this chapter suggests that there are good reasons for disagreeing with Burleigh’s assessment. Indeed, it contends that there is much to appreciate within this overtly “historical section” if one develops a sense for what Augustine is attempting within them.

Books 13 and 14, written around AD 418, are part of a broader set of Books 11–14 which deal with the origin of the earthly and heavenly cities. Books 13 and 14 were written in the midst of the Pelagian controversy but also sought to tackle an issue Augustine invested much time and energy in, from the very beginning of his ecclesiastical career. Furthermore, these two books can be read as commentaries on Genesis on the one hand, and as philosophical tractates critiquing Platonic and Stoic tenets on the other. And while Books 13 and 14 focus on the fall of Adam and its consequences, Augustine does use this opportunity to attack Pelagian positions explicitly in this context.

The predominant theme of ciu. Dei 2, which sets the course for Augustine’s critique of ancient Rome, is the disastrous influence of a religion without public moral teaching to offer. In exploring his treatment of that theme, we must first pause over the word ‘religion’, which is ours and not Augustine’s. ‘Religion and morality’ is the way we would naturally pose the question, and more commonly talk about morality without religion than about religion without morality. Augustine could also have expressed his question in our way. He uses the word ritus (plural), sometimes in phrases, as ritus sacri, ritus religionis, in ways that correspond sufficiently to our use of the term ‘religion’, and on one occasion he even refers to ‘religion and morality’ (ritibus moribusque; ciu. Dei 14.1). But he states the question in terms of the conduct of demons, really existing powers that are worshipped as gods in Roman religion, who have failed to provide the city with laws and its worshippers with moral instruction, and who have peremptorily demanded the homage of corrupting theatrical productions.