The Saint and the City of God

Abstract

This chapter discusses Augustine’s third ‘anthropological’ analogy, between the self that is a saint and the ultimately social state that is the City of God. It elaborates, in the first section, on Rowan Williams’s insight that the image of God in human nature, according to Augustine, is not the mind per se but the mind of the saint, showing how Augustine comes to an understanding of God as Holy Trinity by means of an analogy first to the human mind and thence to the human mind caught up entirely in contemplation of God. The focus of the second section is the body of the saint: not his or her physical body, but the body of Christ, in which the saints are joined through Christ’s mediation between God and humankind. The third part of the chapter is devoted to Augustine’s presentation of the City of God, the communion of saints in Heaven with God. It illuminates the parallels between the saved soul and the soteriological city in terms both of Augustine’s Trinitarian account of human mental agency and his vision of resurrection bodies.