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Then, on the fateful night of August 24, someone inside the city opened one of the 12 recently reinforced gates, and Alaric's army flooded into the streets of Rome. For three days they plundered, pillaged, and terrorized the city. Survivors told of carts filled with corpses, dogs barking and roaming free through the temple precincts, men hunted down and murdered in the public baths. Priests were assaulted, virgins raped, and one aged woman, Marcella, was brutally beaten because she had no gold to offer the attackers. When walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum today, one can still see the green stains of copper coins melted into the stone floor of the marketplace from the conflagration set by Alaric and his marauders.

In 455 (25 years after Augustine's death) the Vandals, led by a brigand named Genseric, invaded Italy and plundered Rome. It was even more devastating than Alaric's raid. The Roman Empire limped along until 476, the date of its decisive, definitive fall when another hairy barbarian warlord, Odovacer, deposed the beardless boy emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Thus, as one historian has said, "Rome joined the company of Nineveh and other fallen empires."

The events of 410, however, had a psychological effect not matched by later episodes. It set Augustine thinking about the meaning of history, the reality of time, and the calling of Jesus' followers to live with hope amidst tottering empires that come and go.

In The City of God, Augustine forged a distinctive understanding of history that differed sharply from both the contemporary pagan paradigm and two other views that had prevailed in the early church until then.

First, he refuted the cyclical view of history—the image of history as a great wheel turning round and round, with no beginning or end. Today, we associate this view with Eastern religions such as Buddhism, but it was popular in Augustine's culture as well. Indeed, the myth of the eternal return was the dominant assumption of the age. When Paul preached about Jesus and the resurrection in Athens, the Athenians thought he was talking about a male God, Jesus, and his female consort, Anastasis (the Greek word we translate as "resurrection," Acts 17:18). Resurrection was a characteristic of the pantheon of dying and rising savior gods celebrated in the mystery religions and, with much more sophisticated language, in the philosophy of Porphyry and Plotinus that Augustine knew so well.

But Augustine could not square this philosophy with biblical faith. The first few words of the Bible contradicted the cyclical view of history: "In the beginning God created." Augustine reflected deeply on the creation narrative in Genesis. In Book 11 of Confessions he recorded a startling, brilliant discovery. He came to see that God had not only created both time and space but had created them simultaneously and interdependently. This insight, which Augustine derived from meditation on the Bible, anticipated Einstein's theory of relativity by 1500 years. History had a definite beginning point when God said, "Let there be." It had a decisive turning point in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And it will come to a certain consummation at a future time known only to God himself.

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