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September 11, 2001, is frequently compared to December 7, 1941, as a day that will "live in infamy." But a more appropriate analogy might be August 24, 410, when the city of Rome was besieged and pillaged by an army of 40,000 "barbarians" led by the Osama bin Laden of late antiquity, a wily warrior named Alaric. One can still see the effects of this cataclysmic event when walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum today. The Basilica Aemilia was the Wall Street of ancient Rome, a beautiful structure in the Forum with a marble portico. One can still see the green stains of copper coins melted into the stone from the conflagrations set by Alaric and his marauders.

Before then, Roman coins bore the legend Invicta Roma Aeterna: eternal, unconquerable Rome. It had been more than 800 years since the Eternal City had fallen to an enemy's attack. In many ways, Rome was like America prior to 9/11, the world's only superpower. But in 410, Rome's military power could not prevent its walls being breached, its women raped, and its sacred precincts burned and sacked.

When Jerome heard about the fall of Rome in faraway Bethlehem, he put aside his Commentary on Ezekiel and sat stupefied in total silence for three days. "Rome was besieged," Jerome wrote to a friend. "The city to which the whole world fell has fallen. If Rome can perish, what can be safe?" The British monk Pelagius, who was in Rome when the attack occurred, gave this report: "Every household had its grief, and an all-pervading terror gripped us."

Responding to those who said Rome fell as the gods' punishment against the ascendant Christians, Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, began writing The City of God, an opus magnum et arduum, as he called it—a "great and laborious work." Augustine completed the book shortly before his death in 430. Its influence extended to the Reformation and beyond. For 1,500 years, it has been the bedrock of a Christian philosophy of history.

As a theologian in an age of terror, Augustine provides wisdom for our own precarious situation. Like C. S. Lewis, Augustine came to the Christian faith through a tortuous process of denial, doubt, false starts, dead ends, and surprising discovery. For nearly nine years, he followed the way of the Manicheans, radical dualists who divided the world into kingdoms of light and darkness and who taught that matter itself was inherently evil. Next he turned to academic skepticism. The skeptics, not unlike some postmodernists today, denied that there was any knowable absolute truth.

Later, he turned to Neo-Platonism, which offered a model of transcendence: It explained the world in terms of a spiritual reality—the ideals of truth, goodness, beauty—that could not be reduced to the flow and flux of the visible, changing world around us. Neo-Platonism continued to influence Augustine even after he became a Christian.

There were, however, two major problems with this philosophy that could not be squared with biblical faith. First, Neo-Platonism argued that matter had always existed. Creation was the work of an artisan who reshaped primordial matter into some other form. But the first five words of the Bible contradicted this cosmogony: "In the beginning God created." Augustine reflected deeply on the creation narrative in Genesis. In book 11 of Confessions he made a startling, brilliant discovery. He came to see that God had not only created both time and space, but that he had created them simultaneously and interdependently. (This insight, which Augustine derived from meditation on the Bible, anticipated Einstein's theory of relativity by 1,500 years.)

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September 2006, Vol. 50, No. 9