City of God
Augustine, De Civitate Dei
Augustine, bishop of Hippo
An answer to a charge about one sacked city, which turned into a history of everything.
- Catch rate
- 26 / 255
- Base research
- 230
- Stat total
- 352
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Twenty-two books, begun in 413 and finished thirteen years later, and not a page of it lost. Near-maximum Stamina.
Augustine set out to answer one charge about one sack of one city, and ended up rewriting how the West reads history. That is as much Contend as a book can carry.
It survives in enormous numbers of agreeing copies. There is very little left to argue about concerning what it actually says.
Sixteen centuries in continuous print. It takes the floor first almost anywhere.
Cited for this book
Rome fell to Alaric in August 410 and the news went round the empire in weeks. Educated pagans drew the obvious conclusion: the city had stood a thousand years under the old gods and had not lasted a century without them. Augustine began the answer three years later and did not finish it for thirteen more.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Two Cities | History | Argument | 76 | 95% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 1 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 9 | Their Own Poets | Rationality | Argument | 65 | 100% | 10 |
| 17 | Question the Premise | Rationality | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 22 | The Universal Church | Ecclesiology | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 26 | Argument from Desire | Natural Theology | Argument | 74 | 100% | 10 |
| 30 | Faith Seeking Reason | Rationality | Argument | 66 | 100% | 15 |
| 34 | Sarcasm | Rationality | Argument | 60 | 95% | 15 |
Read it: All Men Desire to Be Happy
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Latin.
“It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men desire to be happy.”
Augustine, City of God 10.1 (trans. Dods, NPNF¹ 2, public domain).
“…the happy life which all men desire cannot be reached by any who does not cleave with a pure and holy love to that one supreme good, the unchangeable God.”
Augustine, City of God 10.1 (trans. Dods, NPNF¹ 2, public domain) — a few lines after the sentence above.
“Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”
Augustine, City of God 14.28 (trans. Dods, NPNF¹ 2, public domain).
Twenty-two books, begun in 413 — three years after the Goths sacked Rome, and while educated pagans were saying in public that this was what abandoning the old gods had bought.
Those first two sentences are the whole argument from desire, and Augustine builds it in the open. He grants the premise nobody disputes, then names the only thing that answers it.
What sits between them is the philosophers falling out with each other over what happiness is. That disagreement is the point; he is letting it do his work.
Two cities, two loves. Not two places — two directions. Everyone alive is walking one of them, and the cities are mixed together until the end.