and what that meant for the rest of humanity.
For these huge questions, Saint Augustine wrote most of the definitive answers
for the West, though they were certainly modified and reworked over the centuries.
In the City of God, a huge and sprawling work, he defined two cities: the earthly one
in which our feet are planted, in which we are born, learn to read, marry, get old, and
die; and the heavenly one, on which our hearts and minds are fixed. The first, the
“City of Man,” is impermanent, subject to fire, war, famine, and sickness; the
second, the “City of God,” is the opposite. Only there is true, eternal happiness to be
found. Yet the first, however imperfect, is where the institutions of society—local
churches, schools, governments—make possible the attainment of the second. Thus
“if anyone accepts the present life in such a spirit that he uses it with the end in view
of [the City of God],... such a man may without absurdity be called happy, even
now.”^6 In Augustine’s hands, the old fixtures of the ancient world were reused and
reoriented for a new Christian society.
The Sources of God’s Grace
The City of Man was fortunate. There God had instituted his church. Christ had said
to Peter, the foremost of his apostles (his “messengers”):
Thou art Peter [Petros, or “rock” in Greek]; and upon this rock I will
build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I
will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever
thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven; and
whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.
(Matt. 16:18–19)
Although variously interpreted (above all by the popes at Rome, who took it to mean
that, as the successors of Saint Peter, the first bishop of Rome, they held the keys),
no one doubted that this declaration confirmed that the all-important powers of
binding (imposing penance on) and loosing (forgiving) sinners were in the hands of
Christ’s earthly heirs, the priests and bishops. In the Mass, the central liturgy of the
earthly church, the bread and wine on the altar became the body and blood of Christ,
the “Eucharist.” Through the Mass the faithful were joined to one another; to the
souls of the dead, who were remembered in the liturgy; and to Christ himself.
