The title of The City of God is taken by St Augustine from that verse of Ps. 86 (87), which is paraphrased by the wellknown hymn, ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken, Sion city of our God'. Is this city, in his mind, a picture of the Church? Clearly yes, but of the Church in its widest, its cosmic dimensions, the Church which is the heavenly Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, that Jerusalem which is above, which is our mother (Gal. iv, 26), of which the earthly Jerusalem is the type and figure. We attain some apprehension of this city of God by contrasting it with another city, the city of confusion, the diabolical city, of which the archetype is Babel, Babylon.

These two cities are cosmic because their history begins with the creation and ends with the end of the world. In their beginning and end they are clearly distinct—distinct in the holy angels and the fallen angels at the beginning of creation, distinct in the company of the blessed and the company of the damned at the end. The Church as it will be in the resurrection is the society of the just, and of the just alone.