M. B. PRANGERpolitic of the pope and subsequently the king, sought to achieve extension as durability
by imposing its lasting presence on time and history, Augustine’scivitas permixta—in
which the city of God as well as the city of the devil, thecivitas caelestisas well as the
civitas terrena, are represented—is defined in terms of the brevity and unsustainability of
temporality and historicity. As we have seen, Augustine does not shy away from talking
about history—the history of the Roman Empire, for instance. Glorious though that may,
in its own way, have been, however, its beginning and end must be measured against the
priority of the one and onlycivitasfully deserving that name, thegloriosissima civitas dei.
This priority of the city of God is made abundantly clear in the majestic opening sentence
of the book: ‘‘The most glorious city of God, both in the present course of time when it
is on pilgrimage amidst the ungodly while living by faith and in the stability of its eternal
seat which it is waiting for in patience: that is what I have undertaken to defend.’’^14
In fact, however, ‘‘priority’’ is not the right designation for the city of God, since its
presence is founded on an all-pervasive love and its rival is based on a distorted imitation
of that love. This creates many problems concerning how it can be identified.^15 Thecorpus
mysticum, to begin with its point of origin, the externalization of the Eucharist in the
shape of the host’s turning into the real, material, tangible, and measurable presence of
Christ in and through transubstantiation, may, if we can believe Kantorowicz, have devel-
oped into the increasingly discernible contours of institutions.^16 The longer one looks at
the city of God from a noninstitutional, historical point of view, however, the more elu-
sive and remote it becomes. It looks, indeed, as though the ghosts of the unresolved
aporias of time, discussed in book 11 of theConfessions, have come back to haunt August-
ine’s attempts at ‘‘making history.’’ Even if, on the face of it, inThe City of GodAugustine
recoils from trying to account for the enigmatic presence of time as present, he cannot
avoid that dilemma and somehow draws a line between time and eternity along the lines
of change and movement, on the one hand, and immobility, on the other:
If we are right in finding the distinction between eternity and time in the fact that
without motion and change there is no time, while in eternity there is no change,
who can fail to see that there would have been no time, if there had been no creation
to bring in movement and change, and that time depends on this motion and change,
and is measured by the longer or shorter intervals by which things that cannot hap-
pen simultaneously succeed one another? Since God, in whose eternity there is no
change at all, is the creator and director of time, I cannot see how it can be said that
he created the world after a lapse of ages, unless it is asserted that there was some
creation before this world existed, whose movements would make possible the course
of time.^17Yet the moment we try to interpret this passage in terms of the differentcivitates, its
problematic status comes to the fore. Temporality may be in place all right, as the core of
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