The Prideful Soul and the Pagan City

This chapter establishes Augustine’s first anthropological analogy, between one version of the self and the Earthly City. Adam in the Book of Genesis is the prototype of this kind of self. Adam’s original sin was pride, the desire and exhilaration of being in his own power rather than enjoying the dependence on God for which he had been created. The self-inflicted punishment for pride is a deforming of the self along different axes bearing on desire, power and possession: its dissolution between various objects of attention; the torture of the insatiability of its desires; and its unsocial desires to dominate and possess others. The proud self, moreover, puts on a pedestal a conception of human power as being at its best when characterised by a kind of desireless self-possession. Likewise, the Earthly City is divided against itself, pursues war and conquest interminably, and sovereignty over it, howsoever it may be dressed up as being about natural order and control, is in fact a denaturing, puffed up performance.