Chapter 11 examines Augustine’s biblical acceptance, articulation, and defense of the miserable resurrection of the damned to eternal death. While admitting the difficult, but candid words of God in Scripture about the eternality of hell, Augustine refuses to subvert the Christocentric standard of final judgment by merely human preferences and sentiments. Particularly in Book 21 of De ciuitate dei, Augustine argues not only for the possibility of the fleshly resurrection to eternal punishment, but also for its suitability. He recognizes that it is not only the denizens of the earthly city which protests against its own self-selected end, but also certain citizens of the pilgrim city of God whose hearts still bear marks of the earthly city’s love. For Augustine, the God of the resurrection will forever lavish his love, his justice, and perhaps even his mercy upon the resurrected damned, who have eternally and impenitently alienated themselves from him.

Alternative cities structure Augustine’s City of God. The divide between the earthly and the heavenly city returns in his two Romes, a violent city of civil war and a violent city of virtue, in his two Jerusalems, a violent city of civil war and a city prefiguring God’s city, and even among Christians, divided between love of self and love of God. Although the heavenly city’s full realization is deferred to after the end of history, in this life, the heavenly city exists, mixed with the earthly city, on a pilgrimage toward realization. Rome, a dark shadow (umbra) that sets the light of the divine city in relief, instantiates the earthly city’s violence in both its horrific and virtuous manifestations. In its better form, Jerusalem advances toward the heavenly city’s realization as the prefiguration (figura) of what the divine city will realize (implementum).

Chapter 5 inquires with Augustine into the origins and metaphysics of humility and pride, and how we may come to know them. In books XI–XII of The City of God, Augustine explores this theme by reflecting on biblical and Platonic accounts of creation, especially of angels and human beings, and of the birth of Augustine’s famous “two cities” among them.