Written after Rome's sack by the Goths, Augustine answers pagans blaming Christianity for the disaster by dismantling Roman religion and history and contrasting the earthly city with the eternal one.
Books mentioned in The City of God (1)
De Republica by Cicero: “The opinion of the ancient Romans on this matter is attested by Cicero in his work _De Republica_, in which Scipio, one of the interlocutors, says, "The lewdness of comedy could never have been suffered by audiences, unless the customs of society had previously sanctioned the same lewdness."”
Books that mention The City of God (8)
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: “what saith the blessed Saint Augustin, in his treatise 'De Civitate Dei'”
Pragmatism by William James: “The evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good, if we once consider the real magnitude of the City of God.”
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut: “Constant sees Rumfoord's palace "shining out there like St. Augustine's City of God."”
Lent by Jo Walton: Discussed as the alternative to Plato's and Aristotle's political models: "there's the other possibility Plato couldn't imagine. The City of God." He later "preached two sermons on the City of God."
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking: “Another argument was put forward by St. Augustine in his book The City of God.”
Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene: “Father Quixote remembered a phrase from one of the old books he valued most, Augustine's City of God.”
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon: “Yet the Pagans of Africa complained, that the times would not allow them to answer with freedom the City of God; nor does St. Augustin (v. 26) deny the charge.”
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton: “He that is desirous to hear of this disease, or more examples, let him read Austin in his 18th book de Civitate Dei, cap. 5.”