The “City of God” is not only a theological work, but a map for navigating the crisis of the Roman Empire and rediscovering natural law amidst its collapse, which is in more than one sense analogous to the current collapse of the Anglo-American unipolar order. This has led historian Matthew Ehret to propose an exercise in spiritual and intellectual archaeology: to recover the Augustinian perspective on the Roman collapse not as a mere historical fact, but as a mirror in which to recognize the symptoms of our own civilizational decay.
There are essays that read as if the author had held a torch in an ancient cave, and others that, besides illuminating, reveal that the cave is nothing other than a map of our own time. Such is the case with the work of historian Matthew Ehret, published by the Rising Tide Foundation and included in the RTF Spring Anthology, where the author unfolds a bold and erudite reading of the figure of Saint Augustine of Hippo. Under the title “Saint Augustine’s City of God and the Arc of Universal History,” Ehret proposes an exercise in spiritual and intellectual archaeology: recovering Augustine’s perspective on the Roman collapse not as a mere historical fact, but as a mirror in which to recognize the symptoms of our own civilizational decay. The underlying hypothesis is as provocative as it is necessary: the City of God, that monumental work written between 413 and 426 AD, is much more than a theological treatise; It is a practical philosophy of history, a guide for the moral agent who refuses to be shaped by a world that is falling apart.
To understand the magnitude of what Augustine attempted, it is essential to place him within the tumultuous context of his time. In 410 AD, Alaric’s Visigoths sacked Rome. It was not the first sack, but it was the first in nearly eight hundred years to strike at the symbolic heart of the “eternal empire.” The trauma was immense. Many Romans, still pagans or recently converted to Christianity in a superficial way, sought a scapegoat: the Christians, with their rejection of the ancestral gods, had brought divine wrath upon the Eternal City. It was in this context of acute crisis, of broken supply chains and a torn social fabric, that Augustine decided to intervene decisively. Not only to defend the Christian community against the accusations, but to offer a radically new interpretation of what a civilization meant, its rise and its fall. Born in 354 AD in Hippo, in North Africa (modern-day Algeria), Augustine had been a professor of rhetoric and a follower of Manichaeism, a sect that offered a dualistic explanation of the world. But his conversion, sealed with baptism in 385 AD, was not an abandonment of reason, but a reintegration of the best of Plato and Cicero in the light of Scripture. As Ehret rightly points out, Augustine was not merely a provincial bishop: he was an artist of thought, a theorist of music, education, and politics, whose intellectual project constituted the first great renaissance of the West.
The City of God is, in essence, an answer to the question that tormented his contemporaries: why did Rome fall if Christianity was true? Augustine’s answer is devastating and, at the same time, liberating. Rome did not fall because of the Christians, but because its own moral constitution was rotten long before the birth of Christ. The empire, like all earthly cities, was built on self-love taken to the point of contempt for God, while the City of God is built on love for God taken to the point of self-contempt. This is not a matter of geographical or institutional duality, but of two loves that run through history and coexist in every human heart and in every society. With astonishing clarity, Augustine dismantles imperial nostalgia and shows that the greatness of Rome, even in its republican era, was tainted by the thirst for power, by hollow glory, and by systemic injustice. An empire, however vast, is nothing more than a large-scale band of robbers if it lacks justice. This statement, contained in Book Four of The City of God, is a missile aimed at any form of power that seeks to absolve itself through military success or economic stability. True peace, the only peace worthy of the name, is the peace that comes from just order, and that order can only be recognized by a renewed mind, transformed by the habit of discerning God’s will amidst appearances.
But Ehret’s analysis doesn’t stop with Augustine. To grasp the depth of Augustine’s struggle, the author invites us to go back several centuries, to Alexander the Great and the fight between two antagonistic conceptions of philosophy and power. This is where the essay acquires remarkable density. Drawing on the work of philosopher Lyndon LaRouche and Cynthia Chung, Ehret traces a genealogy of the conflict between the Platonic tradition, open to inquiry and discovery, and the Aristotelian tradition, which reduces knowledge to memorization and classification. Far from the schoolboy image that presents Aristotle as Plato’s natural disciple, Ehret argues—citing letters and historical accounts—that Aristotle was an infiltrator who distorted the master’s teachings and ended up tutoring Alexander at the invitation of Philip II of Macedon, who aspired to build an empire based on the “Persian model” of oligarchic rule. This point is crucial because it defines two ways of understanding universal history. One, Aristotle’s, justifies immutable hierarchy, natural slavery, and empire as an end in itself. Another, that of Plato and his true heirs, sees education and the founding of cities—like the one idealized by Xenophon in his Cyropaedia—as an act of love that seeks to share reason and beauty with all peoples. Alexander, under the influence of Delius of Ephesus and his reading of Xenophon, did not want to be a plundering tyrant, but a builder of civilization. His dream was to fuse the best of Greece with the cultures of Asia, and the archaeological evidence of the Greco-Buddhist kingdoms of Gandhara, with their Buddha statues sculpted according to the golden ratio, is a moving testament to what could have been.
The death of Alexander in 323 BC, likely poisoned in a plot involving Aristotle and Cassander, opened the door to fragmentation and the resurgence of the mystery cults that the conqueror had previously suppressed. The cults of Isis, Mithras (Sol Invictus), Cybele, and Attis all resurfaced with force under the reigns of Alexander’s generals, the Ptolemies, and the Seleucids. These cults, of Persian, Babylonian, or Phrygian origin, shared a common structure: the promise of individual salvation through secret initiation, submission to an all-seeing sun god, and the legitimization of despotic imperial power. It is no coincidence that, centuries later, when Rome became an empire, these same cults found a new host. Mithraism, in particular, became the unofficial religion of the Roman legions. What Ehret suggests, following an interpretive line that ranges from studies on occult Christianity to investigations into the role of the Jesuits in the construction of British imperialism, is that there is a continuity of institutional and spiritual forms that run through empires. This continuity is that of the mystical oligarchy, which always seeks to corrupt any movement of moral renewal, be it early Christianity or authentic Platonism, in order to co-opt it and put it at the service of the domination of the few over the many.
Augustine foresaw this battle with crystal clarity. In his time, the priests of the pagan mysteries were attempting to absorb Christianity, either through syncretistic assimilation or by spreading pseudo-Christian Gnostic cults that denied the goodness of creation and the reality of the Incarnation. Faced with them, Augustine did not simply repeat dogmas. He constructed a theology of history where the City of God is a pilgrim on earth, but is not identified with any visible institution or empire. The true community of the faithful is that which, guided by the Holy Spirit, knows how to read the signs of the times and act as an agent of positive change even amidst decay. This is why Ehret is right to call Augustine a “Renaissance thinker before the Renaissance.” His *De Musica* investigates the numerical proportions of rhythm as a reflection of divine order; his *De Doctrina Christiana* proposes an educational program where rhetoric, dialectic, and the natural sciences are at the service of charity and not vanity. There is no fracture between faith and reason, but a hierarchy where reason illuminated by faith can discern, in the midst of collapse, the seeds of a new foundation.
Ehret’s essay culminates, in this first installment, with a reflection on the Silk Road and the thwarted possibility of a truly universal world. Under the Han dynasty, China experienced its own Alexandrian moment: unification, renewed Confucianism, infrastructure development, and openness to cultural exchange. The Silk Road, which connected China with Persia, India, the Arab world, and the Mediterranean, was the materialization of a profound yearning: that civilizations would not destroy each other, but rather enrich one another. But for this yearning to endure, it requires a shared City of God, that is, a tacit agreement on the divine nature of humankind, on its capacity for self-improvement, and on the necessity of just institutions. When that agreement breaks down, when generals become warlords and mystery cults poison the social fabric, then the empire crumbles not from external pressure, but from internal decay.
What makes Matthew Ehret’s work so valuable is not only its scholarship, but its ability to bridge the gap between the fifth and twenty-first centuries. We live, like Augustine, in a time of transition where old imperial narratives are crumbling and elites are searching for scapegoats. The temptation of Manichaeism—attributing all evil to an external enemy or a distant conspiracy—is the same one that plagued Rome before Augustine. Faced with this temptation, The City of God proposes a collective and personal introspection: what do we truly love? Do we build on the rock of love for our neighbor and truth, or on the sand of worldly success and tribalism? Augustine offers no immediate political solutions, but rather a metanoia, a change of mindset that is the only possible foundation for any lasting reform. Therefore, when we read Augustine guided by Ehret’s pen, we discover that the Bishop of Hippo is not an author of the past, but a contemporary of our own. His struggle to restore natural law amidst imperial arbitrariness, his defense of education as a practice of freedom, and his construction of a philosophy of history that distinguishes between apparent progress and true human development are tools more relevant than ever. The question this essay leaves open is the same one Augustine posed in the preface to his work: are we willing to become agents of that pilgrim City, or do we prefer to continue mourning the ruins of a Rome that was never as eternal as we believed?
Footnotes
- Ehret, Matthew. “ St. Augustine’s City of God and the Arc of Universal History .” Rising Tide Foundation/RTF Spring Anthology. The quotation from Augustine on philosophy comes from Against the Academics, Hackett Publishing, trans. Peter King, 1995, p. 4. References to Lyndon LaRouche, Cynthia Chung, and mystery cults are developed extensively in Ehret’s work and in the essays by Chung cited in the original text, particularly “Plato’s Fight Against Apollo’s Temple of Delphi and the Cult of Democracy.”
