Augustine's Two Cities: Veronica Ogle | Faith & Politics #3

Veronica Roberts Ogle teaches at Villanova and wrote Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God. She joins James Spencer for the third episode in the faith and politics series.

She begins with why the book exists. Rome was sacked in 410, the first breach of the city's walls in centuries, and Romans wanted to know whether Christianity had cost them the protection of the old gods — while Christians, riding the high of a converted emperor, were asking why their God hadn't defended them either. Augustine's answer took thirteen years and twenty-two books.

Ogle explains the two cities as loves rather than places: one formed by God's love carried as far as contempt of self, the other by self-love carried as far as contempt of God. She unpacks what "contempt of self" does and doesn't mean, and pushes back on reading the ordo amoris as a ranked list — everything is loved in God, not after God.

The conversation turns to what this means for political life: why no political community has an eschatological end, why Augustine is no optimist about politics, and why he thought a judge should see himself as the woman caught in adultery.

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Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.

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