According to St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei (413-418 / 420-427 CE), the City of God and Babylon are “mixed together”, because only the inner life of each citizen makes one or the other cities. There is no empire or church, king or priest: only the end of time will make evident for all the vision, now guaranteed only to a select few. Everybody will know who really followed the divine law imprinted in the heart as a seal in wax. Augustine’s theory of the three Cities (Rome and Babylon here, the heavenly Jerusalem finally) was founded on the Christian message and both on Platonism and Cicero’s work. It was a very deep theory, that our western History was not able to understand, often transforming every Augustinism in a sort of Caesaropapism. Particularly in the Middle Ages, Augustine’s answer to the defeat of the Roman Empire was seen as a justification of the temporal power of the Church.
