Why Does God Allow Suffering? — Augustine’s Answer in City of God
⏱ 11 min read
You have been asked the question a hundred times, by your own mind, in the small hours, after the diagnosis or the loss or the long unfair stretch you are still inside of. You have read the article that quotes Romans 8:28 too quickly. You have read the one that explains the free will defence. You have read the one that says God uses suffering for growth. None of them have held. The pain you are in does not need a syllogism. It needs a theology old enough and slow enough to have been thought through by people who themselves suffered, and who did not solve the question so much as walk it patiently to a place the syllogism could not reach.
This is a slow walk through Augustine’s answer — the one he gave in the City of God, which he wrote in his late sixties while the world he had known was visibly ending and Rome had just been sacked by the Goths. He is not a comfortable read. He is something better: a man who had to answer this question himself, in real time, while the answer was being demanded of him by people whose lives had also just collapsed. If a journal feels like a steadier home for the long carrying of this question, the Devotionals on Anxiety series was designed for the questions whose answers arrive slowly — including this one.
What Augustine was writing into
The City of God was written between 413 and 426 AD. In 410, Alaric and the Goths had sacked Rome — the city that had been the symbol of civilisation for a thousand years, the city no foreign army had taken in eight hundred. The pagans, still loud in the empire, were saying it had happened because Rome had abandoned the old gods. The Christians, who had been ascendant for a century, were silent because the question was unanswerable in the small terms they were used to. Why did your God let this happen.
Augustine sat down to write the answer. The book is over a thousand pages long in modern translation. What he produced is not a quick defence of God. It is a theology of two cities — the earthly one, which suffers, falls, and disappoints — and the city of God, which is being built underneath the rubble, slowly, by the grace of a God who does not promise that the earthly city will not fall.
This is the first thing to know about Augustine’s answer. He does not promise you that the suffering will be removed. He does not promise you that the diagnosis will reverse, or the loss will be undone, or the unfair stretch will end on a timetable that satisfies you. What he does say — and what the modern church often will not say in its quick comfort articles — is that the suffering is real, that the earthly city in which it is happening is itself temporary, and that the city being built underneath it is the one that holds.
This is not a comfortable answer. It is a true one. The discomfort is part of the truth. (For the wider posture of bringing the loud mind to a slow practice rather than a quick answer, prayer for anxiety and overthinking walks the same grammar applied to the night the question will not let you sleep.)
The first passage — the restless heart inside the suffering
Augustine’s most famous line is the doorway into his whole theology of suffering, even though it appears in the Confessions rather than the City of God. It is small, and you have probably read it before:
“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 again, slowly. Thou madest us for Thyself. That is the premise. The human heart is not made primarily for earthly comfort. It is made for God. Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee. That is the diagnosis. The restlessness — the ache, the dissatisfaction, the longing that nothing in the earthly city has ever permanently filled — is not a malfunction. It is the heart functioning correctly. It is the heart doing exactly what it was made to do: refuse to find its rest in anything that is not God.
Now read the question of suffering through this lens. Why does God allow suffering. Part of Augustine’s answer is that suffering, in the earthly city, is the loud version of the same restlessness that has always been quietly under the surface. The diagnosis breaks the small illusion that health was the rest. The loss breaks the small illusion that the relationship was the rest. The unfair stretch breaks the small illusion that the comfortable life was the rest. Each of these losses is a violent uncovering of something the soul, in its restless making, has already known: that none of these things were ever the rest.
This is not the same as saying the suffering is good because it teaches you a lesson. Augustine is more careful than that. The suffering is not good. The earthly city is fallen, and the suffering in it is real evil, not pedagogy in disguise. What Augustine is saying is that the suffering, though evil, does not have the final word — because the heart underneath the suffering was already made for a rest the suffering cannot take. The suffering uncovers; it does not invent the longing it uncovers. The longing was there, made by God, waiting to be answered by God.
This is the first move in Augustine’s theology of suffering. The restless heart is doing exactly what God designed it to do. The pain is real, and the pain is not the meaning. The meaning is the rest the heart was made for, which the pain has only made more visible.
The second passage — God’s silence inside the suffering
The harder line — and the one that will sit closer to where you actually are — comes a few books later in the Confessions, and it does not pretend the silence away:
“These things Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace; long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Holdest Thy peace. He sees. He does not always speak. The God of Augustine is not the God of the comfort article, who is always quickly explaining the suffering. He is the God who sees, who is long-suffering, who is plenteous in mercy and truth — and who, in the present moment of the particular suffering, often holds His peace.
This is the part the modern reader needs more than the first. The question why does God allow suffering is partly the question why does God not speak now, in the middle of it, the way I need Him to speak. And Augustine, who was himself watching the visible collapse of an empire that he had loved and served, does not soften the silence. He names it. Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace. The silence is not abandonment. The seeing is real. The long-suffering is real. The mercy is real. But the speaking, in this hour, is held.
The relief in this is small but real. The believer who has been quietly accusing herself of having lost God’s favour because He has not spoken into her particular suffering can let the self-accusation go. The silence of God is not new. The silence of God did not begin with you. The silence of God was, for the Augustine who watched Rome burn, the texture of the hour — and the silence did not mean God was not seeing. The seeing was the work He was doing in the silence. (The version of this on the page — a place to bring the unanswered question of suffering night after night without requiring God to speak before you can write — is what the Devotionals on Anxiety series was built to hold: a quiet structure that does not pretend the silence away, and does not pretend it is the last word either.)
Pause in the body for a moment
The chest that has been tight since the question began arriving — let it loosen by half a breath. Let the jaw that has been set release. Let the shoulders that have been carrying the question as a permanent weight lower by an inch. The body has been carrying the suffering as bracing, and the bracing has not lessened the suffering; it has only added a layer of physical exhaustion to the spiritual exhaustion. Let the body un-brace, for one slow exhale, before you read on. The God whom Augustine describes as long-suffering and plenteous in mercy is present in the un-braced body as well as in the braced one — and the un-braced body is where the practice that follows can actually land.
The third movement — the two cities
The line in the City of God that does the real work of the answer is structural rather than poetic. Augustine spends a thousand pages developing it, and the shortest version is this. There are two cities. The earthly city, built on the love of self, which suffers, falls, and disappoints. The city of God, built on the love of God, which is being constructed underneath the visible one, by means the eye cannot fully see, and which alone is permanent.
The earthly city is where the suffering is. The Goths sack the earthly city. The diagnosis arrives in the earthly city. The loss happens in the earthly city. The unfair stretch is endured in the earthly city. The earthly city is not nothing; God made the world good, and what suffers in it is real, and the suffering matters. But the earthly city is not the whole of what is being built.
The city of God is the part that does not fall. It is the city that the saints across centuries have been quietly added to, brick by brick, often through their suffering rather than around it. It is the city whose builder and maker is God, the one Hebrews points to and Augustine spends his book describing. When Augustine answers the question why does God allow suffering, his answer is not because suffering produces growth. His answer is because the earthly city is fallen, and God has not promised to spare you the falling of the earthly city — but He has promised to build, through and underneath the fallen city, the city that lasts, and your suffering, brought to Him, is somehow taken up into that building.
This is the answer the syllogism cannot reach. The suffering is not solved. The suffering is taken up. The earthly city in which it happens is real, but it is not final. The city of God, which is being built underneath, is the one in which your suffering is given its true place — not as the meaning, but as the doorway through which the soul, made for God, finds its way home to Him.
You may not find this comforting in the way the quick article would have offered comfort. Augustine does not promise comfort of that kind. What he offers is something steadier: a theology in which the suffering is real, the silence is real, and the long-suffering mercy of God is also real — and the last word, when it comes, will be the city that does not fall.
If the question you are carrying has also wrapped itself around the silence of God — the why does God feel so distant version of the same question — the restless heart of Augustine is the sibling piece, and Spurgeon on the minister’s fainting fits is the slow companion for the days the suffering has become depression.
How the slow answer holds across the years
Augustine wrote the City of God across thirteen years. He did not finish quickly. The book is a slow walking-with — the kind of work that gets written by a man who has lived the question long enough to know that no fast answer would hold for the people who were going to read it.
The same slowness is the practice for the woman carrying the question now. The answer is not received in a single reading. It is received the way Augustine received it himself — over years, in small returnings to the same passages, in the practice of bringing the suffering, again, into the company of the God who sees, who is long-suffering, who holds His peace at moments but does not abandon. The slow answer holds because it does not require the suffering to end before it can begin to comfort.
The daily practice for the woman walking this is small. Sit with one passage. Pray it back to God. Bring the particular suffering into the chair with you. Do not require Him to explain. Stay long enough that the breath has lowered. Get up. Go on with the day. Repeat tomorrow. (For the longer rhythm of this kind of slow practice — faith over fear, written across a hundred days — 100 days of faith over fear is the long-form companion, and for the days the spiritual attack feels personal rather than philosophical, how to pray when you’re under spiritual attack is the slow companion piece. For the wider series of devotionals built for the suffering that does not quickly go away, Christian devotionals on anxiety that don’t pretend it goes away is the home page of the practice you are quietly being invited into.)
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The answer, slowly held
Why does God allow suffering. Augustine’s answer is not a sentence. It is a theology that is still being lived seventeen hundred years later. The restless heart is doing what it was made to do. The silence of God is not abandonment. The earthly city is fallen, and the city of God is being built underneath it, and your suffering — real, unsolved, brought to Him — is somehow taken up into that building.
Sit with the answer slowly. It is the kind of answer that holds across years rather than minutes, and you have years to give it.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety.
