For those of you keeping track (or trying to keep up) with the Book of the Month Challenge, we should have finished Pleasures of God, The Cross of Christ, Turning Points, and City of God. Unfortunately, I find myself one month behind schedule. As it stands, I just opened Augustine’s City of God yesterday and I have a feeling (given that it’s 1100 pages long!) that I won’t be able to catch up this month. What will make the reading that much slower is that Augustine’s insight are brilliant and worthy of reflection.
Take for example, his description of the sufferings of the good and the wicked. In this first section of City of God, he’s trying to explain that the sack of Rome by the barbarians in 410 a.d. was not because the Roman Empire had turned away from their pagan roots and embraced Christianity (as some of the leaders in Rome were declaring). In fact, suffering comes on the evil and good alike in this life and is not necessarily a mark of God’s anger or favor. It all depends on the “fragrance” of the sufferer.
“When the good and the wicked suffer alike, the identity of their sufferings does not mean that there is no difference between them. Though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different. Virtue and vice are not the same, even if they undergo the same torment. The fire which makes gold shine makes chaff smoke; the same flail breaks up the straw, and clears the grain; and oil is not mistaken for lees (sediment) because both are forced out by the same press. In the same way, the violence which assails good ment to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin, and annihilation. Thus the wicked, under pressure of affliction, execrate God and blaspheme; the good, in the same affliction, offer up prayers and praises. This shows that what matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings. Stir a cesspit, and a foul stench arises; stir a perfume, and a delightful fragrance ascends. But the movement is identical.” (Book I; Chapter 8)