City of God

City of God is the title of E. L. Doctorow's novel and the central theological concept it interrogates, drawn from Augustine's classic work of the same name. The novel uses this phrase to frame a meditation on the relationship between the earthly city and the divine, ultimately proposing a 'hallowed secularism' as a response to religious violence and the politicization of faith. The title itself becomes a recurring motif, invoked in moments of personal crisis, public address, and cosmic speculation, binding together the novel's disparate narratives into a single inquiry into the nature of belief and the possibility of the sacred in a secular age.

Augustine's Legacy and the Novel's Title

The novel's protagonist, Thomas Pemberton, a former Episcopal priest, carries a well-worn paperback copy of Augustine's City of God, its pages "almost totally underlined." This physical object signals the deep intellectual debt the novel owes to the early Christian theologian. Pemberton admires Augustine as "a hell of a writer," appreciating his "writer's bag of tricks" and the way he treats "doctrinal notions as if they exist, like characters." Yet Pemberton draws a firm line at Augustine's doctrine of original sin, confessing, "He loses me when he says babies are born damned to hell unless someone sprinkles water on them." This ambivalence—respect for the literary and philosophical power of the work, rejection of its harsher dogmas—mirrors the novel's own stance toward religious tradition. The title is praised for its evocative power: "But City of God, that's a good title. I like the image, don't you? It does have a certain something you don't get from green pastures." The phrase is thus not merely a reference but a deliberate aesthetic and theological choice, one that offers a more complex and urban image of the divine than pastoral metaphors.

The Earthly City and the City of Birds

The novel expands Augustine's binary of the Earthly City and the City of God by introducing a third city: the City of Birds, located at Valdemingomez, an enormous garbage dump north of Madrid. This is described as "a great urban aviary," populated by over a hundred thirty species of storks, hawks, egrets, linnets, kites, jackdaws, ravens, condors, and turkey buzzards. The birds do not migrate, as they have found a permanent home amidst the refuse. Their nests are built from the detritus of human civilization: eggs are laid in old Big Mac containers, nests are lined with cassette tape, songbirds flitter in and out of rusty cans, and grackles huddle in TV cabinets. The scene is rendered with a kind of grotesque beauty, as gulls bomb old sofas with the clamshells of paella and flocks of rock doves coo and peck over fields of chicken bones, the bones clacking "like train tracks, clink like wind chimes, shiver and shirr like shuffled cards, bongo and bop, and chickuh-chick-chick like a hot marimba band." This third city is a parody and a fulfillment of the divine city, a place where life thrives not in spite of but because of human waste. It suggests that the sacred can be found in the most profane of places, a theme that resonates throughout the novel.

The Unremarked God and the Modern City

The novel applies the concept of the City of God to the modern metropolis, describing it as "the city of the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, the God of history." This city is a "great historically amassed communal creation," which, when viewed from above at night, appears as "a jeweled wonder of the universe, floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness." The novel asks how much of this splendor and insolence "comes of the inspiration of God." However, this idealized vision is contrasted with a dystopian future in which the city's economy becomes insufficient, its rituals break down, and its shape blurs. Prophets arise to announce "the wrath of God has come down on the city of unnatural pride, the earthly city," and the unremarked God is "resurrected in all His fury." This apocalyptic vision, presented as a movie pitch, shows the earthly city collapsing under the weight of its own pride, while the divine city remains an elusive, unattainable ideal. The novel thus uses the Augustinian framework to critique both the secular city's self-regard and the violent religious responses it can provoke.

A Hallowed Secularism in Public Address

The novel's most explicit engagement with the political theology of the City of God comes in Sarah Blumenthal's address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion in Washington, D.C. She argues that "the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt," a state of theological uncertainty that holds people "in thrall to ethical behavior," while "the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering." She contends that "the impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, is a religious impulse," and that "in the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill." Her solution is a form of secular ethics derived from religious tradition: "to hold in abeyance and irresolution any firm convictions of God, or of an afterlife with Him, warrants walking in His spirit, somehow." She trusts those who gravitate toward "symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees," and who read Scripture with Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." This speech articulates the novel's central proposal: a faith that is self-aware, compromised, and yet ethically binding, a "hallowed secularism" that resists the murderous certainties of both religious and secular dogmatism.

The Wedding Prayer and the Critique of God

This vision is given its most dramatic expression in Thomas Pemberton's wedding prayer, which he delivers as "my final act as a Christian and an ex–Christian priest." The prayer addresses God directly, acknowledging the "monstrously evil mortifiers of humanity" and the "exponential murder of souls" that have occurred in the century's wars and genocides. Pemberton refuses to ask how an omniscient God could allow such catastrophes, but he does accuse God of complicity: "the relentless and unimaginable genocidal cruelties shuddering across the world in our age have brought You into disrepute." He goes further, stating that "there is a risen suspicion, that You are part of the problem. Men use You at will for their most hideous purposes. You do not seem to resist—anyone who wants You, and for whatever foul, murderous reason, can have You. You are bought and embraced like the lowest, most pathetic streetwalker." This is a radical critique of a God who is too easily appropriated by the powerful, a God who has become a tool of the earthly city rather than a beacon of the divine one. The prayer, delivered at a wedding that symbolizes the union of Christian and Jewish traditions, becomes a final reckoning with the God of history, a God who must be held accountable for the world that has been made in His name.

Cosmic Speculation and the Search for Meaning

The novel's engagement with the City of God extends beyond theology into cosmology, using the language of science to explore the same questions of creation and purpose. The opening meditation on the Big Bang describes the universe expanding "exponentially from a point," not bursting into pre-existent space but rather space itself "blasting out along with everything in it." This cosmic event is presented as a kind of divine act, a "silent flash into being." The novel also invokes the anthropic principle, which holds that the universe's fundamental constants seem fine-tuned to allow for the appearance of human life. As one character explains, "whatever the universe is composed of seems to have made us possible." This principle is offered as a modern, scientific argument for a universe that is hospitable to consciousness, a naturalistic counterpart to the idea of a Creator. The novel also references Einstein's habit of calling God "the Old One," a name that is "really very exact" because God is "by definition not only unduplicable and all-encompassing but also without gender." Einstein's God is not the "concerned God people pray to or petition," but a God who "lived in gravity" or "shuttled between the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force." This cosmic God, immanent in the laws of physics, offers a different path to the divine than the God of religious tradition, one that is compatible with scientific inquiry and yet still evokes a sense of awe. The novel thus weaves together Augustine, Einstein, and the anthropic principle into a single, sprawling meditation on the nature of the divine and the possibility of belief in a secular age.