Abstract

The paper studies Augustine’s attitude to urbanism by tracing his readings of the episode of Cain and Abel. In particular, Genesis attributes the origin of the first city and of urban culture to Cain, while the lineage that leads to Israel is pastoralist. Augustine, by contrast, performs a distinctive misreading of the Biblical text. He assigns offspring to Abel, whom he figures both as commingling with the children of Cain and as founders of their own civitas. This move enables a typological reading of the story of Cain and Abel, whose respective foundations may then figure in a sequence of Augustinian contrasts between Jerusalem and Babylon, civitas dei and civitas terrena. But it also disallows, or allows Augustine to evade, the ideological stakes of the Genesis narrative, which so dispreferred urban culture and, perforce, urban religion. Throughout the paper attends carefully to complex metaphors elaborated by Augustine with regard to Latinate vocabularies of both politics and public law.