What Is the Kingdom of God? — Augustine on the Two Cities
⏱ 13 min read
You have heard the phrase since childhood. The kingdom of God. You have prayed it in the Lord’s Prayer most weeks of your life — thy kingdom come — and you have said the words with a kind of practised reverence, while quietly admitting to yourself that you have never been entirely sure what you were asking for. A future kingdom at the end of history? A present one inside the church? Something happening invisibly in souls? Something political? Something not political at all? The phrase has covered so much ground in so many sermons that the woman who has been a Christian for thirty years still sometimes pauses, mid-prayer, and wonders what exactly she is asking come.
This is the slow version of the answer. Augustine, the African bishop who wrote The City of God across more than a decade after the sack of Rome in 410, gave the most enduring framing the church has of the question what is the kingdom of God — and the framing he gave is older, stranger, and quieter than the popular versions you may have inherited. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow doctrinal reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Augustine was writing in the wreckage of an empire. Rome had fallen. The pagans were saying it had fallen because Rome had abandoned its old gods for the Christian one. Augustine sat down to answer them, and instead of answering them on their terms — no, Christianity did not destroy Rome — he wrote a book that quietly reframed the entire question. There are not, he said, two civilisations competing for the same earthly throne. There are two cities — two loves, two citizenships, two ultimate allegiances — running side by side through all of human history, woven invisibly into the same streets and the same families and the same churches. One city loves God. One city loves itself. The kingdom of God is the visible flowering, in time and eternity, of the first. (For the wider context of Augustine’s pastoral response to suffering in that wreckage, why does God allow suffering? — Augustine’s answer in City of God walks the companion ground. For the image-of-God anthropology that grounds the citizenship, what is the image of God? — Augustine on the Imago Dei is the deeper-soil sister-essay. And if the prayer life inside the kingdom is where you have felt the gap, how to pray when God feels far — Augustine’s Confessions pattern walks the daily companion.)
The kingdom of God, for Augustine, is not first a place. It is not first a future. It is the present, slow, mostly hidden gathering of the people whose central love is God — and the slow unmaking of the city whose central love is the self.
The first passage: made us for Thyself
“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the famous third sentence of the Confessions, and it is the doorway into Augustine’s whole account of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is not a foreign country the soul travels to. The kingdom is the place the soul was already made for. Thou madest us for Thyself. The human being is constructed, before any history begins, for citizenship in the city that loves God. The restlessness of the soul outside that citizenship is not a flaw; it is a homing signal — the structural unease of a creature trying to live somewhere it was not built to live.
Notice what this does to the modern question what is the kingdom of God. The modern question tends to assume the kingdom is something other than the world we already live in — a place we go, a time we wait for, a private experience inside us. Augustine is saying something gentler and more upsetting: the kingdom is the home of every soul that has ever existed, whether the soul knows it or not. The two cities are running through every street in every century because every human being is built for the kingdom and is either turning toward it or turning away from it, every day, in small choices the city cannot see.
The kingdom of God begins, then, in the structure of the soul. It begins in the delight in Thy praise that He himself awakens — not a delight we manufacture, but a delight He calls into being in us when we let Him. The first citizenship is interior. The kingdom is built one heart at a time, and the heart is the smallest unit of the city.
This is also why the kingdom is so easily missed. It does not look like a kingdom in the worldly sense. It has no army at the gate. The citizens are usually quiet. The capital is not in any geography. Thou madest us for Thyself — the kingdom begins, every day, in the inner turning of one woman’s heart toward the One she was made for, and the turning is so small it does not even make the local news. But the kingdom is being built, and the citizens are being gathered, and the city that loves itself is being slowly emptied as each soul finds, finally, the rest it was always for.
The second passage: the two cities, the two loves
The line from the Confessions prepares the ground. But Augustine names the two cities themselves most precisely in The City of God itself, in the famous distinction at the heart of Book XIV:
“Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, the heavenly by love of God extending even to contempt of self. The one, therefore, glories in itself; the other in the Lord.”
— Augustine, The City of God
Read it twice. Slowly.
Notice the precision. Augustine does not say the earthly city is run by bad people and the heavenly city is run by good people. He does not say the earthly city is the secular state and the heavenly city is the church. He says the two cities are created by two loves. The whole architecture turns on what the citizens love most. The earthly city is the gathering of the souls whose deepest love is the self — and this love, run to its full length, ends in contempt of God. The heavenly city is the gathering of the souls whose deepest love is God — and this love, run to its full length, ends in contempt of self, in the sense that the self stops being the centre around which everything else organises.
This is harder than the popular framing. Contempt of self sounds, to the modern ear, like a kind of psychological self-loathing, and Augustine is not pointing at that. He is pointing at something subtler — the slow displacement of the self from the centre of one’s own life as God comes to occupy the centre He was always meant to occupy. The contempt is not hatred; it is the quiet de-throning of the self as the thing one’s whole existence revolves around. The kingdom of God is the city where God is, finally, the centre — and the self has been moved, gently, to the edge where it was meant to live all along.
This is also why the two cities are so hard to tell apart from the outside. They run through the same streets. They share the same families. Both cities have decent people in them, hard-working people, good-tempered people, people who love their children. The difference is not on the surface. The difference is in the love — in what is at the centre of the soul. Two women may live nearly identical Tuesdays. One of them is in the city that loves God. One of them is in the city that loves the self. The outside of their Tuesdays may be indistinguishable. The inside — the orientation of the centre — is the whole distinction Augustine is naming.
For the Christian woman reading this article, this is the diagnostic question Augustine would put to you, gently. What does your soul most centrally love? Not what does it claim to love on Sunday. Not what does it know it ought to love. What does it actually orient around, in the small ungoverned choices of a Tuesday at four in the afternoon? The kingdom of God begins where that centre, slowly, becomes Him.
The somatic — feeling for which city you are operating from
Pause here for one moment. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is honest in a way the mind is not.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat against the floor. Let one hand rest, lightly, on the breastbone. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, ask the body — not the mind, the body — a single question. What is at the centre of this chest right now? Do not answer in words. Wait for the inward orientation to surface. The centre is not theoretical. It is somewhere — the work, the worry, the child, the bank balance, the relationship, the ambition, the fear of how the year ends, the small ongoing grievance, the screen. Or He is at the centre, quietly, and the other things are circling Him at their proper distance.
The body knows which city is at the centre. The orientation is not a moral score; it is a piece of information. The orientation can be moved. Augustine’s whole pastoral programme assumes that the centre can be slowly re-oriented, by daily small practices of attention, until what was at the centre last year has moved to the edge and He has come to occupy what He was always meant to occupy.
Let one slow exhale go all the way out. The body settling into the longer exhale is the body learning what the soul is learning — that the centre is allowed to be Him. Take the hand away. Continue reading.
A daily home for the practice — between the second and third passages
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built for this kind of slow re-centring. A short passage each evening. Room for the honest sentence. No demand to perform. The kingdom of God grows in the soil of daily small returns — Augustine knew this, which is why the Confessions are themselves a slow daily account of the re-centring he lived through. The workbook is the daily room. Not the cure. The cure is His. The room is yours.
The third passage: the kingdom hidden inside the visible world
The third passage is from late in The City of God, where Augustine names the strange present-tense of the kingdom. The kingdom is not only future. The kingdom is now — though hidden:
“Even now the Church is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven. Accordingly, even now His saints reign with Him, though otherwise than as they shall reign hereafter; and yet, though the tares grow in the Church along with the wheat, they do not reign with Him.”
— Augustine, The City of God
This is the passage that gives the church its quiet posture toward history. The kingdom is already here — even now His saints reign with Him — and also not yet in its full form. The kingdom is hidden inside the visible world the way leaven is hidden inside dough, the way a mustard seed is hidden inside a field, the way the citizens of the heavenly city are hidden inside the same towns and offices as the citizens of the earthly city. The kingdom is being established right now, in the small inward turnings of every soul that loves God, and it will not be visible in its full form until the end of history — but it is real now, and you are in it now, if your love is in the right place.
Notice the honesty in Augustine’s clause about the tares. The tares grow in the Church along with the wheat. The visible church is not identical to the kingdom of God. The visible church contains people whose love is in the earthly city even as they sit in the heavenly city’s pews. Augustine is not naive about this. He has been a bishop long enough to know that the line between the two cities does not run neatly between the baptised and the unbaptised. The line runs through every congregation, every family, sometimes through a single soul. The kingdom of God is the true gathering — the one only God sees clearly — of the souls whose love has actually been moved to Him.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part that quiets the perfectionism. You do not have to produce a flawless church on earth to be a citizen of the heavenly city. The flawlessness is not the point. The love is the point. The tares and the wheat will run together until the end. Your job is not to weed the field; your job is to be the wheat. To let your love be slowly re-rooted in Him, day by day, while the visible church continues to be the mixed and imperfect place it has always been. The kingdom of God is being built inside the imperfect church — through it, not despite it — by the slow daily turning of one soul at a time.
This is also what Augustine meant by the kingdom being hidden inside the visible world. You will not always see it. The brightness of the earthly city will often look more impressive — its careers, its houses, its press coverage, its visible successes. The heavenly city will look smaller. Quieter. Less photogenic. But the kingdom is being built every day, in a thousand chairs where a woman sits down with her Bible and turns her heart, again, toward the One who made her for Himself. The chairs are the foundations. The slow turning is the building. The visible result — the kingdom in its full unveiling — is on the far side of history.
What this means for what you ask when you pray thy kingdom come
When you pray thy kingdom come, in the Lord’s Prayer, you are asking for two things at once. You are asking for the full coming of the kingdom at the end of history, when the city of God will be visible at last and the city of self will be undone. And you are asking for the daily coming of the kingdom inside the small territory of your own heart — the territory you actually have stewardship over — where the slow re-centring is, day by day, possible. The prayer is both eschatological and immediate. The big arrival, and the small daily one.
Augustine would tell you that the daily one is where the work happens. The big arrival is in God’s hand. The small daily one — the slow turning of the centre, the gentle de-throning of the self, the quiet practising of citizenship in the city that loves God — is in your hand, every morning, in the chair where you meet Him. The kingdom of God comes in the lives of the citizens before it comes in the visible world. The order matters.
(The sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series sit at what is biblical hope? — Owen on hope that anchors the soul and what is regeneration in the Bible? — Edwards on the new birth. The three together walk the doctrines that the daily-companion practice of the workbook is built to feed.)
What the kingdom will actually feel like in a year of small turning
The kingdom of God, in your own day-to-day, will not feel like a kingdom in any worldly sense. It will feel, mostly, like the slow re-arranging of small things. The first thought of the morning will, over months, gradually become Him instead of the calendar. The reflex in the difficult moment will, over months, gradually become prayer instead of resentment. The centre of the chest, when the body is honest, will gradually feel less like a held tightness and more like a settled openness. These are small re-orientations. They are also the visible local effects of citizenship in the heavenly city.
You will not feel different all at once. You will feel different, slightly, after months — and the difference will be that the centre has moved. The self is not where it used to be. He has come to occupy what He was always meant to occupy. The kingdom is already here, in the small unit of your own re-centred heart, and the unit will grow as the practice grows, and the city of God on earth is being built, one re-centred heart at a time, in a way Augustine would recognise from the fifth century.
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