Dalla terra al cielo? La civitas Dei di Agostino tra eredità classica e visione escatologica

URL:https://www.academia.edu

Keywords: Augustine, De civitate Dei, utopias, late antique Christianity, ancient and modern political thought, eschatology, biblical intertextuality, classical receptions, Cicero, Platonism, Stoicism

Abstract
This article approaches Augustine’s treatise On the City of God (De civitate Dei) as a pivotal work situated between classical political thought and Christian eschatology, arguing that its enduring influence on Western utopian paradigms cannot be reduced to later secular reinterpretations. Rather than proposing an ascetic withdrawal from civic life, Augustine articulates a dialectical vision in which the earthly and the heavenly cities coexist in the temporal realm, compelling Christians to engage actively in the sociopolitical order while orienting their interior life toward an eschatological fulfilment. Through a close reading of Books 10, 19, and 22, the present study highlights Augustine’s complex reception of Greco-Roman traditions—particularly Platonism, Stoicism, and Cicero’s philosophica—and the ways in which biblical intertextuality reshapes classical models of community, justice, and moral progress. Augustine’s civitas Dei emerges as a transitional utopia: simultaneously present and incomplete, grounded in human experience yet projected toward the final consummation of history—as a stratified intertextual (and intercultural) ensemble, which aims to transform ancient theories of the ideal community into a dynamic vision of ethical relationality and political responsibility, laying the foundations for medieval and early modern conceptions of the perfect society.