Flesh in the City of God

1. Read the 2 page analysis of flesh in The City of God. 
2. Write a 1 page summary of the analysis. Times New Roman 12 font, double spaced, no header except Name.
3. Papers should be emailed to mrjcbecker@gmail.com by class time on November 25th. 

Some Background on The City of God- 
"The work of Augustine's most likely to be known to modern students of political thought is The City of God. Although this work was often copied in the middle ages (382 manuscripts have survived), a reading of the whole work was never part of the university curriculum. Extracts from it were included in influential anthologies, such as Gratian's Decretum and Peter Lombard's Sentences. 

Although the members of the two cities have different ultimate values, they may have intermediate ends in common—for example, they all desire peace on earth. Insofar as any particular state serves such common ends it will have the cooperation of members of the city of God. See City of God,XIX.17 (pp. 945–7). As a Platonist Augustine thought in terms of a hierarchy of levels of reality, in which lower levels imitate or reflect the higher levels. 

Augustine's is not a philosophy of “black and white”, of stark opposition between the forces of light and the forces of darkness—this was the Manichean philosophy, to which Augustine at one time subscribed, until the reading of certain works of the Platonists had led him to reject it. According to Augustine there is no absolute evil. Anything evil must be to some extent good, or it could not exist at all. Its evil consists in disorder or misdirection, in its failing to attain all the goodness appropriate to it. “The peace of all things lies in the tranquillity of order, and order is the disposition of equal and unequal things in such a way as to give to each its proper place” (City of God, XIX.13, p. 938). There are many orderings and sub-orderings, and there are therefore different kinds or levels of peace, and (for beings capable of moral choice) different kinds or levels of virtue, justice and happiness." (from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-political/#CitGod).